the breakthrough novel from one of the most talented and celebrated young novelists in America -- a stirring, sweeping romance about a Good Woman and her Good Man, falling into bed, into marriage, into parenthood, into responsibility, and out again...The King Is Dead is that simple-but-beautiful, forever-compelling thing: the story of a heart-stirring romance that breeds a family and a history, then fades to black -- out of which something else is born. We're in the American South -- it's the New South born of the New Deal. The old ways of the Confederacy have been eliminated by all that Yankee efficiency and progress, except of course they haven't. We have a Good Man, Walter, moving into the heart of the machinery of American life, as the indispensable eyes and ears of the wily Governor of Tennessee. He meets his Good Woman, Nicole, in a ballpark carpark, a perfect crucible for an emblematic American romance; they banter and spar in best Bogart-Bacall fashion, then fall to billing and cooing, and, after proper delay, into bed, into marriage, into parenthood, into responsibility. And we follow that long, lovely fall. And then where are they? What can surprise them? What can rend their sweet, earned ease asunder? Well, you'll see...Along the way, the defining moments of a life, of a family history, are given in surprising, gorgeous prose, which has an incantatory luxury to it. You recline into this prose, comfortable as can be, and don't ever want to rise out of it. It's quite a departure for Jim Lewis. This third novel has been a long time coming, and it's very much a case of Great Third LP Syndrome, following Startlingly Inventive Ethereal First Album (Sister) and Difficult, Elusive Second Album (Why the Tree Loves the Axe). This is what we've been waiting for. This is why we wait.