Drawing upon his own memories of growing up in Royston, Georgia, Kay follows Colin, his brother Wesley, and their friends through fierce battles fought on the school playground, an exhilarating visit to the Brady Dasher Flying Circus, desperate attempts to throw a search party off the trail in the Black Pool Swamp, and gleeful celebrations when all-important baseball games are won. With characters ranging from Reverend Bartholomew R. Bytheway, a reformed fertilizer salesman who operates the Speaking-In-Tongues Traveling Tent Tabernacle, to Freeman, a Georgian Huck Finn who knows the swamp as well as the other boys know their backyards, Terry Kay draws a marvelously nuanced portrait of the rural South poised on the brink of change.
Terry Kay is a writer who currently lives in Athens, Georgia. He has published several novels, among them The Year the Lights Came On (1976), After Eli (1981), Dark Thirty (1984), To Dance with the White Dog (1991), Shadow Song (1997), The Runaway (1998), and The Kidnapping of Aaron Greene (1999).

ISBN 0820311286 paper • $15.95
312 pp. • 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 in.

"The Year the Lights Came On hit my desk one day, went home with me that afternoon and kept me up, sans supper, sans television, sans twilight walk in the yard, until I had finished every last word of it. It is a lovely, moving, suspenseful story with that rare quality which so few writers achieve, the thing that makes you say, "That's the way it was. I remember'"
—Celestine Sibley, Atlanta Constitution

"This is a story of youth, its joys and adventures, its pains and battles, its loves and friendships. Kay has come up with a deliciously nostalgic look at the whole experience of Growing Up."
—Christian Science Monitor