Beth

Trumble: a minimum security federal prison, home to the usual assortment of criminals, drug dealers, bank robbers, swindlers, embezzlers, tax evaders, two Wall Street crooks, one doctor, at least four lawyers. And three former judges who call themselves The Brethren: one from Texas, one from California, and one from Mississippi.

Some say that the first hint that Bill Bryson was not of Planet Earth came when his mother sent him to school in lime-green Capri pants. Others think it all started with his discovery, at the age of six, of a woollen jersey of rare fineness. Across the moth-holed chest was a golden thunderbolt. It may have looked like an old college football sweater, but young Bryson knew better.

This novel is a story inspired from John Grisham's own childhood in Arkansas. The narrator is a farm boy named Luke Chandler, age seven, who lives in the cotton fields with his family in a little house that's never been painted. The Chandlers farm 80 acres, and when the cotton is ready they hire a truckload of Mexicans and a family from the Ozarks to help harvest it. For six weeks they pick cotton, battle the heat, the rain, the fatigue, and sometimes, each other.

Ray Atlee is a professor of law at the University of Virginia. He's 43, newly single, and still enduring the aftershocks of a surprise divorce. He has a younger brother, Forrest, who redefines the notion of a family's black sheep. And he has a father, a very sick old man who lives alone in the ancestral home in Clanton, Mississippi. He is known to all as Judge Atlee, a beloved and powerful official who has towered over local law and politics for 40 years.

Neely Crenshaw was once star quarterback for Messina High School's football team. Afterwards his life went nowhere. But now the man who molded him, Coach Eddie Rake, is dying and Neely returns to Messina. Players old and young have returned. Neely congregates with them on the bleachers as they wait for Rake to finally pass away. It is in the many conversations that follow that Neely can confront what his explosive relationship with Rake really meant to him and, in the moment of loss, find redemption.