The Caretaker - Ron Rash

Written by Ron Rash
Read by James Patrick Cronin
Format: M4B
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

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The Caretaker
A Novel By Ron Rash
Narrated by James Patrick Cronin
Release date: 09-26-23
Language: English
Format: Audiobook
Length: 6 hrs and 3 mins
Publisher: Random House Audio
Categories: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Small Town & Rural

About this listen
ONE OF THE NEW YORKER’S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • Told against the backdrop of the Korean War as a small Appalachian town sends its sons to battle, The Caretaker by award-winning author Ron Rash (”One of the great American authors at work today”—The New York Times) is a breathtaking love story and a searing examination of the acts we seek to justify in the name of duty, family, honor, and love.

It’s 1951 in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. Blackburn Gant, his life irrevocably altered by a childhood case of polio, seems condemned to spend his life among the dead as the sole caretaker of a hilltop cemetery. It suits his withdrawn personality, and the inexplicable occurrences that happen from time to time rattle him less than interaction with the living. But when his best and only friend, the kind but impulsive Jacob Hampton, is conscripted to serve overseas, Blackburn is charged with caring for Jacob’s wife, Naomi, as well.

Sixteen-year-old Naomi Clarke is an outcast in Blowing Rock, an outsider, poor and uneducated, who works as a seasonal maid in the town’s most elegant hotel. When Naomi eloped with Jacob a few months after her arrival, the marriage scandalized the community, most of all his wealthy parents who disinherited him. Shunned by the townsfolk for their differences and equally fearful that Jacob may never come home, Blackburn and Naomi grow closer and closer until a shattering development derails numerous lives.

A tender examination of male friendship and rivalry as well as a riveting, compelling novel of familial devotion, The Caretaker brilliantly depicts the human capacity for delusion and destruction all too often justified as acts of love.

2023 Ron Rash (P)2023 Random House Audio

Critic reviews:

“With each Ron Rash story, you expect flawed people trying desperately to survive against the odds, and a rich sense of place, and images that linger, and beautiful language that you catch yourself reading over and over. What you don’t always expect is a wicked plot. The Caretaker delivers all of the above in a story that becomes a race to the finish.” —John Grisham