Born in Kentucky in 1925, Robert Coleman Dowell is one of the great post-war US writers. He is the author of five novels including One of the Children is Crying, Island People, and Mrs October Was Here.

"Inside the book, the reader encounters teeming, charged emotions, dark and active with pain. Coleman Dowell... has evidenced courage and invention in creating a work of art so original and difficult as to be alive to baffling and baffled perceptions." -- Edmund White, New York Times "The kind of novel that can change a reader's life." -- Bradford Morrow, Voice Literary Supplement "This is a novel to take time over and to savor for its psychological insight and melancholia." -- Gay Times