<p>Shelby Foote’s magnificently orchestrated novel anticipates much of the subject matter of his monumental Civil War trilogy rendering the clash between North and South with a violence all the more shocking for its intimacy. <em>Love in a Dry Season</em> describes an erotic and economic triangle in which two wealthy and fantastically unhappy Mississippi families—the Barcrofts and the Carrutherses—are joined by an open-faced fortune hunter from the North a man whose ruthlessness is matched only by his inability to understand the people he tries to exploit and his fatal incomprehension of the passions he so casually ignites. Combining a flawless sense of place with a Faulknerian command of the grotesque Foote’s novel turns a small cotton town into a sexual battleground as fatal as Vicksburg or Shiloh—and one where strategy is no match for instinct and tradition.</p>
