Raines's coming-of-age novel, set in depression-era Alabama, combines romance and tragedy to evoke a time and place distant in memory but alive in the great tradition of American storytelling.

In 1932 in Milo, Alabama, Prohibition was on, the depression was on, Franklin D. Roosevelt was riding his campaign train across America,
and Bluenose Trogdon--a man who had a real calling for making whiskey just like his daddy before him--had devoted customers as far away asBirmingham.

One of the people he was on good terms with was Brant Laster, just home from The University of Alabama and the first of his family to graduate. For Brant it was a time to renew ties of love and friendship--with his kind, upright father, who had a suitable Scripture to go with every sale he made at his general store; with Bluenose; and with Brant's girl, slender, pale-haired Blake King. Blake--in her own view liberated by her college years in Atlanta, though in Brant's eyes corrupted by the men she
met there--stirs him to the thought that ""every man is his own Iago."" But it is Bluenose--boozy, profane, lustful, wise, comic, racked by passion for the wife who shuns him--whose inevitable fate finally sets Brant on his journey into the world.