all the living

It was as if he were trying to make it clear to a world that wasn't even watching that he was in this thing alone, that there was suffering under way for the one left alive, but that he would endure.  Perhaps even endure it better the rougher it was, as if couched in the pain was the secret satisfaction of suffering. He would prolong now the sorrow if that was all there was to prolong.  She walked into the kitchen and filled up a glass and, unable to quiet her thoughts, she watched the rigns of light spiral the skin of her hand.  AS she carried the cold glass back through the front room, she stopped suddenly, her heart cramped in her chest, and she looked up.

C. E. Morgan
from All The Living

Morgan's enchanting debut follows the travails of a young woman who moves to Kentucky with her bereaved lover in 1984. Aloma, herself an orphan from a young age, leaves her job at the mission school where she was raised to help her taciturn boyfriend, Orren, with his family farm after his family is killed in a car accident. Once at the farm, he retreats into himself and working the land, leaving Aloma to wrestle with her desire to pursue her dream of being a concert pianist. As her relationship with Orren becomes more collision than cohabitation, Aloma finds in a local preacher a deep friendship that complicates her feelings for Orren, who drags his feet on marrying her. Young Aloma's growing understanding of love and devotion in the midst of deep despair is delicately and persuasively rendered through the lens of belief—be it in religion, relationships or music. Morgan's prose holds the rhythm of the local dialect beautifully, evoking the land, the farming lifestyle and Aloma's awakening with stirring clarity. - Publisher's Weekly

Update on Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 06:25PM by Michael

I went to college with C. E. Morgan.  That's what first made me pick up the book. That and the fact my wife brought it home.  Morgan is a talented writer who puts to words the complex emotions most people don't even know they feel; and she she seems to do it effortlessly.  That's one of the things I enjoy about All The Living and I look forward to the nights where I get to lay in bed and read until my eyes close with sleep.