Pam Durban – författare

In The Tree of Forgetfulness, writer Pam Durban, winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award, continues her exploration of southern history and memory. This mesmerising and disquieting novel recovers the largely untold story of a brutal Jim Crow-era triple lynching in Aiken County, South Carolina. Through the interweaving of several characters' voices, Durban produces a complex narrative in which each section reveals a different facet of the event. The Tree of Forgetfulness resurrects a troubled past and explores the individual and collective loyalties that led a community to choose silence over justice.

The award-winning author’s “gorgeously-crafted second collection of stories” explores moments of profound loss, discovery, and transition (Charlotte Observer).The stories in this volume explore the myriad ways people lose, find, and hold on to one another. When all else fails her characters—science, religion, family, self—the powerful act of storytelling keeps their broken lives together. Each story in this rewarding and multifaceted collection introduces people who yearn for better lives and find themselves entangled in the hopes and dreams that heal and bind us all.The title story—chosen by John Updike for The Best American Short Stories of the Century anthology—follows two generations of a family driven by the “patient and brutal need that people called hope.” In “The Jap Room,” winner of the 2008 Goodheart Prize, a woman tries to help her WWII veteran husband finally come home. “Rowing to Darien” introduces a famous English actress as she rows away from her husband’s rice plantation. In “Hush” a gravely ill man encounters himself in the darkness of Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave. These and other stories deftly broach universal themes of love, loss, and the redemptive power of storytelling.Foreword by the Flannery O’Connor Prize–winning author Mary Hood