Satire at its gentlest and best and humor at its richest mark this story of a blustery retired military officer who mounts his final campaign against those self-appointed and elected guardians of the public good (and the taxpayer’s purse strings) who are guilty of the sort of petty graft and private enrichment endemic in the mythical, sleepy, southern town of Fredricksville, Georgia.

While Berry Fleming’s interest in history has produced two books of non-fiction, one of which dealt with the Civil War (Autobiography of a City in Arms), The Affair at Honey Hill marks the first time he has used the Civil War as a setting for any of his novels. The story is presented through the eyes of Edwin Daws, a 56 year old Confederate soldier, from his present day (winter, 1864) awareness, as well as his memories, both recent and past. Assigned with his militia company, The Silver Grays, to repel an assault on the railroad leading into Savannah near Honey Hill Plantation, he recalls the month he spent there 18 years earlier, working as a scribe for the Reverend Trezevant Ferebee, and of his growing love for the Reverend’s enigmatic daughter-in-law, Julia. What is to become of them now with Sherman’s forces moving fast to attack the city? Where is Julia? Can he find her in all this desperate confusion and extricate her? The Affair at Honey...

Set in eastern Long Island, in an area reminiscent of the Hamptons, it is a tale about a wedding party: the bride and groom each apprehensive, but for different reasons. On the scene are a former lover of the bride’s who makes a sudden appearance and a young swain who is equally taken with the bride-to-be.

They meet by chance on a Georgia road: William Wesley Johns, a middle-aged novelist with a manuscript to mail, and the girl with two fiddle cases who hitches a ride. In a lonesome spot the fan belt breaks, so Johns and the girl, Jo, who is as independent as a bird and as spontaneously musical, set out through the woods to find help. What they find instead is an absorbing adventure, a cast of backwoods people, and a strange journey down a haunting river. The bizarre events among the primitive people they meet in the woods parallel the discovery by Johns of the subterranean realities of his own life, which he has tried to ignore. At the center is the girl, intuitive and unpredictable, who is responsible both for the adventure and for the discovery. Brilliantly conceived and executed, The Winter Rider was originally published by Lippincott in 1960, when Berry Fleming was 61 years old. The novel is filled with the spellbinding imagery and introspection that mark Mr....

This comic third novel in our Berry Fleming series centers on Lucinda, a local girl-makes-good, who returns on her psychoanalyst’s suggestion to Fredricksville, Georgia, in order to “find herself.” A successful author and playwright in New York City, she poses a distinct problem for the residents of The Homestead—a large, communal home left to any member of the Telfair family who wishes to stay—since all of the characters in her novels and plays are based upon her relatives’ antics. And the members of the Telfair clan, for their part, prefer to keep their private comings and goings out of the public eye. Hustlers, hoteliers, swindlers and drunkards, bankers and bank robbers, madams and prostitutes, northern aristocrats and southern gentry, and plain old-fashioned working people are all in Lucinderella, enlivened by the deliciously satirical eye of one of the South’s most extraordinary novelists.

Captain Bennett’s Folly is a direct descendant of Fleming’s earlier comic novels, Colonel Effingham's Raid and Lucinderella. Like them, there is a narrator—in this case Walker Williams—who reports an adventure replete with rogues and innocents, while making an artful, funny and wistful case about the immorality of our times. Walker spins out a tale of how he and his hedonistic family journey to the Florida Keys during the hurricane season in order to prevent rich Uncle Nolan Bennett—“pushing eighty but not pushing very hard”—from marrying his young housekeeper and supplanting them as his legitimate heirs. The scheming relatives, however, have a tough adversary in the eccentric Uncle Nolan, and his struggles to escape from their manipulation are at the core of Fleming’s yarn.

Who Dwelt by a Churchyard centers around an old man about to move, who—as he sits before a fireplace throwing ancient photographs upon the flames—recalls the major events in his life. It is a stunning, moving work, written with great economy, and yet so richly textured that it gives one a feeling of having digested a work of fiction twice its length: an end of life novel that is clearly up to Fleming’s own highest standards.

Bob Otis, an unmarketable author who is just starting his own publishing company in order to get his latest novels in print, is abruptly sidetracked when a relative, so distant that Otis doesn’t even place him, phones from Chicago with a request: his father, who has just died, wishes to be buried in the family plot in a small town in Georgia.   This call leads to another wonderful comedy of manners as Otis, whose Southern sense of obligations won’t permit him to totally avoid this undertaking, is reluctantly sucked into a family reunion at the burial site: a burial attended by a cast of wonderfully eccentric characters who also have no knowledge of the deceased.   This novella is a direct descendant of Fleming’s earlier comic novels: Colonel Effingham’s Raid, Lucinderella, and Captain Bennett’s Folly. Indeed, many of the zany, colorful, and irreverent characters of Lucinderella and...

Originally published in 1938 by Harcourt, Brace, this tale of people who migrate to New York City in search of careers and fulfillment was the first work that brought Berry Fleming to national prominence as a novelist.

The fictional town of Georgetown, Alabama, is home to a sweeping cast of characters whose lives intertwine during a sweltering and languid summer. 

This sprawling novel concerns the lives of two generations in one family; of their loves both licit and illicit, of their work, and of their personal triumphs and tragedies. It is a story, at first, about the three Woodruff brothers: Peter, a businessman, Leonard, an artist, and Ike, an attorney and member of Congress who risks his political career to prevent a lynching and bring justice to a black man falsely accused of murder. And it is about George Islar, a thoughtful physician, and his beautiful wife, Margaret, who is loved by Leonard. It is a triumphant expression of the human spirit, of the artist and of the forces that inevitably mold the lives of each succeeding generation, told by a modern master who has lived to see all of the ages of man about which he so consummately writes.

Waiting at the airport of a Caribbean island for his homeward bound plane, Edward Ray—the bookman of the title—reflects on this week, which has changed his life. First, there was the cargo ship voyage to San Juan de Pinos, a journey shared by an odd assortment of fellow passengers whose lives impinge on his own, and who entertain one another—in the manner of the travellers in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales with stories of their own unusual experiences. Then there are his hopes for meeting Claudia—unseen for three decades—and for reviving the love they shared 30 years ago. Lastly there is Janet Tyner, a young woman who offers him a ride on the island and then gives him much more than he ever bargained for. The Bookman's Tale is a lush and exotic novel, compact with the sights and smells of the Caribbean, of desire and passion, and with the mysterious ways of fate. It is a novel marked, as well, by the sensitive reflections of the...