'Between grief and nothing I will take grief'. In New Orleans in 1937, a man
and woman embark on a headlong flight into the wilderness of illicit passion,
fleeing her husband and the temptations of respectability. In Mississippi ten
years earlier, a convict sets forth across a flooded river, risking his one
chance at freedom to rescue a pregnant woman. From these separate stories
Faulkner composes a symphony of deliverance and damnation, survival and
self-sacrifice, a novel in which elemental danger is juxtaposed with fatal
injuries of the spirit.