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Gaither Stewart’s rootless protagonist, Govar Killian, returns to the town of his youth in search of a connection with his past. Intermingled with the current city’s scrubbed facade, Killian’s compulsive meanderings in Asheville offer him tantalizing glimpses of the streets he once knew. In each woman he pursues, memories of his lost love, Jeannette, beckon. This Asheville, unlike Thomas Wolfe’s, is willing to welcome her long lost son, or perhaps, as Tsalagi shaman and Merrimon Avenue garage mechanic Patrick Barefoot informs Killian, “You can’t get away from anything . . . We carry our places in us forever.”
Gaither Stewart’s searching portrait of lost Govar strikes a chord with all those who have risked wandering. —Desmond O’Grady, author of Dinny Going Down
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