As a boy, Horatio Adams had a predilection for pondering any given moment’s long history of causation. When he was twelve years old and his parents drowned on the Titanic, obsession with the conspiracy of memory, identity, and future death fastened on him, culminating years later in the sequence of tragic events contained in The Long, Long Love.

Against the nestled, genteel setting of 1950s Middle Tennessee, Walter Sullivan gracefully plots Horatio’s darkly misguided love for his family and his rigid reverence for an ancestral Confederate general. Sullivan’s evocative novel illustrates the irony of destroying what we cherish through fear of its mortality.