Fiction. Scott Ely's latest novel is the chronicle of two down-river journeys, disparate in time, but oddly merging in intensity, and finally, intent. When Robert Day discovers a French diary written by an ex-slave named Octavius—who fled to Haiti after murdering his master, and his lover, for initiating plans to take a wife—he immediately decides to imitate Octavius' journey down Pearl River to the Gulf of Mexico, driven by his own grief over his murdered wife. But as Robert travels, and translates the diary, he learns just how terribly violent Octavius's escape was. And that violence soon emerges not only in Robert's life, but in the lives of the three men accompanying him on the journey.

Author City: ROCK HILL, SC USA

Scott Ely was raised in Jackson, Mississippi. He served in Vietnam as an infantryman. He received his MFA from the University of Arkansas. For the past twenty-three years, he has been teaching writing in South Carolina at Winthrop University. He has published five novels and three collections of short stories and is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship and a Rockefeller Fellowship to Bellagio, Italy.