A Gathering of Old Men

Stirring, heroic, and wonderfully laced with the musical languages of the Bayou, Ernest J. Gaines—the foremost voice in contemporary African American literature—adds another breathtaking saga to his canon with A Gathering of Old Men. When Sheriff Mapes is summoned to a sugarcane plantation to find a dead Cajun farmer, he knows who committed the crime. Mapes finds himself powerless, however, when nearly 20 elderly black men confess to the murder. Can justice be served, or will the dead man’s brutish father pass judgment his way? Building to a climax that is as stunning as it is inevitable, A Gathering of Old Men powerfully describes the racial tensions in 1970s Louisiana. Narrators Peter Francis James, Michelle-Denise Woods, Sally Darling, Graham Brown, Murphy Guyer, Tom Stechschulte and Mark Hammer bring Gaines’ masterful prose to vivid life. This insightful novel takes its place among Gaines’ thought-provoking classics, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and In My Father’s House.