Discover this extraordinary and beautiful novel from one of America's greatest novelists.

In rural Illinois two tenant farmers share much, finally too much, until jealously leads to murder and suicide.

Discover this extraordinary and beautiful novel from one of America's greatest novelists.

In rural Illinois two tenant farmers share much, finally too much, until jealously leads to murder and suicide. A tenuous friendship between lonely teenagers - the narrator, whose mother has died young, and Cletus Smith, the troubled witness to his parent's misery - is shattered. After the murder and upheavals that follow, the boys never speak again. Fifty years on, the narrator attempts a reconstruction of those devastating events and the atonement of a lifetime's regret.

**One of the BBC’s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**