Light in August

In 1920s Jefferson, Mississippi, Lena Grove arrives pregnant and searching for the father of her child — a man she believes is named Burch. When Byron Bunch, a local mill worker who passes as white despite his mixed heritage, hears only that name, he assumes she means him; their brief affair sets in motion a decades-old tragedy involving race, identity, and betrayal. Told through shifting timelines and a narrator's unreliable memory, the novel is Faulkner at his most lyrical and haunting — a meditation on how the past refuses to let go of those it has already broken.