One morning, six-year old Sonny is awoken by his crying mother, who
tells him that, come tomorrow morning, they are leaving to go to
Gran'mom's house--without Sonny's father, Eddie. Later that morning,
Sonny witnesses a fight between his parents, which revolves around his
father having stayed out late the night before because his car had
broken down. Eddie has apparently been neglecting his wife and son,
devoting his free time instead to repairing his old car. In order to win
back his wife, Eddie--with Sonny in tow--pays a visit to Madame
Toussaint, an old lady knowledgeable in the ways of voodoo, who tells
Eddie that the only way to save his marriage is by burning his car to
the ground.
This unforgettable story leads the reader through an eventful day on a
Southern sugarcane plantation, and shows, through the eyes of a child,
what life was like in the rural South of the 1940s. This new edition of
A Long Day in November features Ernest J. Gaines's original
introduction, as well as the black-and-white illustrations that
accompanied the first edition of the book.
Ernest J. Gaines's 1993 novel A Lesson Before Dying won the
National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, was nominated for the
Pulitzer Prize, and was an Oprah Book Club pick. Gaines has been a
MacArthur Foundation fellow, awarded the National Humanities Medal,
nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and inducted into the
French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Order of Arts and Letters) as a
Chevalier. He lives in Oscar, Louisiana.
