Description: In The Tree of Forgetfulness, writer Pam Durban, winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award, continues her exploration of southern history and memory. This mesmerizing and disquieting novel recovers the largely untold story of a brutal Jim Crow-era triple lynching in Aiken County, South Carolina. Through the interweaving of several characters voices, Durban produces a complex narrative in which each section reveals a different facet of the event. The Tree of Forgetfulness resurrects a troubled past and explores the individual and collective loyalties that led a community to choose silence over justice.
Review Quotes:
Praise for Pam Durban:
"Pam Durban renders her characters and their world with such rich and beautiful complexity that the only fair response to someone asking what it's about is to press the book into their hands and insist they read it." -- Tommy Hays, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"A graceful, poignant, and ultimately satisfying story." -- Charles Sermon, The State
"Haunting and irresistible... Durban has written a splendid, engrossing, and, above all, deeply thoughtful novel that will linger in readers' minds long after they close its cover." -- Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Oxford American
"Durban's carefully managed cast of characters -- antebellum aristocrats, slave families and their descendants in the modern South -- are drawn with subtle grace, producing a narrative of compelling intensity." -- Publishers Weekly