Absalom, Absalom!

In the Mississippi of 1909, a man named Thomas Sutpen arrived with a small group of wild Haitian workers, wrestled a plantation out of the wilderness, married the daughter of a local merchant, and set about building a dynasty with the ferocity of a man trying to outrun his own past. A hundred years later, two students at Harvard are still trying to understand what happened to him — and why it still matters.

Many critics consider Absalom, Absalom! not only Faulkner’s greatest novel but the greatest American novel ever written. It is a book about stories — about how we reconstruct the past from fragments, rumour, and the urgent need to make sense of what our ancestors did and why. The four narrators who attempt to tell Sutpen’s story tell four different stories, and the truth — if there is one — lies somewhere in the charged space between them.

Faulkner’s sentences here are famous for their density and length — they spiral and accumulate and suddenly explode into clarity. To read them is to feel the weight of history pressing on the present. One of the essential novels of world literature. Published by Vintage.