The release date for the English version of 'A Painted House' by
John Grisham is Feb 2004. If you enjoy this novel, it is available for buy as a paperback from Barnes & Noble or Indigo, as an ebook on the Amazon Kindle store, or as an audiobook on Audible.
"On the same day, the Mexicans and the hill people came. On a Wednesday in the first part of September 1952. With three weeks remaining in the season, the Cardinals trailed the Dodgers by five games, and everything seemed lost. But before dinner, my grandpa and father could be heard muttering things that were rarely heard, and the cotton was waist-high to me and over my head. Maybe it's a "good crop."
This is how John Grisham's latest book, which was inspired by his own upbringing in a small Arkansas town, opens. Luke Chandler, the narrator, is a seven-year-old farm kid who lives in a small, unpainted cottage amid the cotton fields with his parents and grandparents. The Chandlers cultivate eighty acres that they rent rather than own. When the cotton is ready to be harvested, they bring in a truckload of Mexican laborers and an Ozarks family to assist.
They pick cotton for six weeks, enduring the heat, the rain, their weariness, and sometimes one another. As the weeks go by, Luke sees and hears things for which a seven-year-old could not have been ready, and he discovers that he is holding secrets that would permanently alter the Chandlers' life in addition to endangering the harvest.
©2000, 2001 Random House, Inc. (P)2001 Belfry Holdings, Inc. Random House, Inc.'s Bantam Doubleday Dell Audio Publishing division.