Shine Hawk

Billy Crew almost cracks up when his girlfriend Hazel Rance marries his buddy, lumberjack Frank Jackson. Billy flees the South for New York, only to return years later to confront his past. ``Told in a series of long, digressive flashbacks that slow the narrative, this novel is, at its best, a haunting, incantatory meditation on sin and salvation, loss, love and the need to go on,'' wrote PW. (May)