Light in August

Lena Grove, young, pregnant and alone, travels on foot from Alabama to Jefferson, Mississippi, looking for Lucas Burch, the father of her child. In town she meets Byron Bunch, a devout mill hand who falls in love with her, and learns of two outcasts: the disgraced minister Gail Hightower and Joe Christmas, a drifter whose uncertain racial identity has shaped his whole life, and who is tied to the killing of Joanna Burden. Faulkner's 1932 novel braids these stories together in a Southern community defined by race, religion and isolation.