Sabbath Creek

A Novel

Title Details

Pages: 176

Trim size: 5.250in x 8.000in

Formats

Paperback

Pub Date: 02/01/2017

ISBN: 9-780-8203-5056-1

List Price: $19.95

eBook

Pub Date: 03/15/2011

ISBN: 9-780-8203-4057-9

List Price: $20.95

Related Subjects

FICTION / Literary

Sabbath Creek

A Novel

A coming of age storyin the best tradition ofsouthern fiction

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  • Description
  • Reviews
  • Awards

In his second novel, Judson Mitcham, with plain but elegant language, creates an emotional impact rivaled only by his critically acclaimed debut novel, The Sweet Everlasting (Georgia). Sabbath Creek is the story of Lewis Pope, a fourteen-year-old boy thrust into an adult world of heartache and brokenness. When his beautiful but distant mother takes him on an aimless journey through south Georgia, the cerebral and sensitive Lewis is forced to confront latent fears—scars left from the emotional abuse of an alcoholic father and the lack of comfort from a preoccupied mother—that crowd his interior world.

At the heart of the journey, and the novel itself, is Truman Stroud, the quick-witted, cantankerous owner of the crumbling Sabbath Creek Motor Court, where Lewis and his mother are stranded by car trouble. His budding friendship with the ninety-three-year-old black man is his only reprieve from the mysteries that haunt him. Despite his prickly personality and the considerable burden of his own personal tragedies, Stroud becomes the boy’s best hope for a father figure as he teaches Lewis the secrets of baseball and the secrets of life.

Sabbath Creek is more than a coming-of-age novel. And while Mitcham provides a nuanced look at the relationship between a white adolescent boy and a black old-timer, his second novel transcends the tired theme of race relations in the South. This compassionate, smart, powerful work of fiction touches the pulse of the human spirit. It travels from the ruined landscape of south Georgia and takes us all the way through the ruined landscape of a broken heart.

At fourteen, Lewis is growing into his full life while Stroud, ninety-three, is nearing the end of his, but their radiant friendship overrides age and race. This fine novel is another heart-warmer like The Sweet Everlasting, and its understated prose is lit from within by Mitcham's respect for all the ways human love manifests itself between unlikely people, and then transforms them.

—Doris Betts, author of Souls Raised from the Dead

Brief as it is, Sabbath Creek has more substance and emotional impact than many novels five times its length. Rarely does one find such strength in a piece of contemporary fiction, nor as much truth about certain conditions of the spirit. It is a story that holds one intriguingly entranced. A story I cannot consider anything less than a triumph.

—Fred Chappell, author of I Am One of You Forever

Baseball fan that I am, I am fearful that many reviewers and potential readers will regard Sabbath Creek as one of those baseball novels, but it is no more a baseball novel than Malamud's The Natural. Or, for that matter, it is no more about baseball than The Old Man and the Sea is about fishing. Sabbath Creek is, like these two masterworks, nothing shy of an elegant work of fiction, and like all such works, is about the whole wide world.

—Reginald McKnight, author of He Sleeps: A Novel

Like many great works of literature, Sabbath Creek is the story of a journey—a quest for meaning.

—Smoky Mountain News

In Mitcham's masterfully drawn, emotionally rich gem of a second novel, 14-year-old Lewis Pope is caught in the middle of a dangerous family crisis. . . . Mitcham brings vividly to life the rural community of Sabbath Creek, and he handles the emotional and psychological complexities of this story with remarkable subtlety. He also has important things to say about the redemptive power of human kindness and friendship. A powerfully realized, deeply satisfying novel; enthusiastically recommended.

—Library Journal

Scattered clues situate Judson Mitcham’s slender second novel in the mid-1990’s, but Sabbath Creek is a transcendent coming-of-age story that feels unshackled to any particular time. Its sense of place, however, is pungently particular, infused with the surface languor and latent violence of the Deep South. . . . This spare, lovely novel, while generous in humor, is anchored by sorrow and interspersed with portents of tragedy. . . . Lewis observes everything with the alertness of someone who does not yet take common experiences, such as kissing and drunkenness, for granted; he never resorts to shorthand to convey them, but describes them with a scrupulous fidelity to his own perceptions.

—New York Times Book Review

Here is the honest storytelling of Judson Mitcham's best narrative poems and of his novel, The Sweet Everlasting. Sabbath Creek is made newly distinctive by the immediacy of the characters' travails, their humanity, and the timelessness of the novel's main themes—the journey, the meeting of the mentor, the coming of age of Lewis Pope. The uniqueness of the story lies in the recasting of these classic literary roles.

—Judith Cofer, author of The Meaning of Consuelo

Judson Mitcham’s fiction has a dark, brooding quality—a sort of sweet-natured melancholy—that makes it impossible to predict redemption or eternal damnation for his wonderfully flawed characters. . . . There are no throwaway passages in a novel by Judson Mitcham. Every scene matters, every character counts and every psychological insight is well-earned. And what is not said can be every bit as important as what is.

—Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Winner

25 Books All Georgians Should Read, Georgia Center for the Book

Winner

Townsend Prize for Fiction, Chattahoochee Review and DeKalb College

About the Author/Editor

JUDSON MITCHAM's poems have appeared in Poetry, the Georgia Review, and Harper’s. His novels, The Sweet Everlasting and Sabbath Creek, are both winners of the Townsend Prize for Fiction. He teaches writing at Mercer University.