Ava's Man

The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author of All Over But the Shoutin' continues his personal history of the Deep South with an evocation of his monther's childhood in the Appalachian foothills during the Great Depression, and the magnificent story of the man who raised her.

Rick Bragg brings his astonishing gift for storytelling to the tale of his grandfather, a man who kept his family one step ahead of poverty and starvation. Charlie Bundrum was a roofer, a carpenter, a bootlegger, and a fisherman. He could not read but he asked his wife, Ava, to read him the paper every day so he would not be ignorant. He was aman who took giant steps in rundown boots, a true hero whom history would have otherwise overlooked.

A portrait of an ineradicably memorable figure in a singular time, a moving reflection on home and family and on the author's own connection to a lost stretch of dirt road along the Alabama-Georgia border—Ava's Man is Rick Bragg at his stunning best.