First published in 2001, Sap Rising moves through Grandville, a rural Southern town where—much like in Sherwood Anderson’s Wines­burg, Ohio and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God—lives overlap, secrets travel, and longing circulates like blood.

Across twelve interconnected narratives, Christine Lincoln charts the inner lives of families bound to place even as they imagine escape. A boy named Sonny slips onto a porch in the humid dark and meets a visitor whose presence quietly alters his sense of what the world might contain; another stumbles into the unbearable intimacy of his mother’s affair with his uncle; and an intense friendship forms between a woman afraid she will become everyone else and another afraid she won’t.

Sap Rising reveals how the ordinary edges of the past press insistently into the present, and how even the smallest towns contain vast, shifting interior worlds.