Only Love Can Break Your Heart

“A wonderful, beauty-haunted piece of work. Tarkington's voice in his hard-to-put-down debut novel has a timeless feel to its cadences, the same bittersweet music we hear in the storytelling of the best of our Southern writers.” —Bob Shacochis, author of The Woman Who Lost Her Soul

Eight-year-old Rocky worships his older brother Paul--sixteen and full of rebel cool, smoking cigarettes, driving around in his Nova blasting Neil Young--until the day Paul, in an act of vengeance against their father, picks Rocky up from school and nearly leaves him for dead in the woods. Paul then runs off with his beautiful, fragile girlfriend, never to be heard from again.

Seven years later Rocky is a teenager himself. Although he's never forgotten the abandonment of his boyhood hero, he's now getting over it, with the help of the wealthy neighbors' daughter, ten years his senior, who has taken him as her lover. But the affair sets off a sequence of events that bring ruin to both families.

In the spirit of Willie Morris, Tom Franklin, and Wiley Cash, this spellbinding debut draws you into a small-town American Gothic story of family fealty, scandal, and murder.

“This addictive tale of abandonment and forgiveness will haunt you long after you've turned the last page.” —Elizabeth Stuckey-French, author of The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady

“An elegant bildungsroman . . . The plot turns along family strife, naked desire, and sometimes violent treachery, but at its core Only Love Can Break Your Heart is a love story that just might break your heart, too.” —Matt Bondurant, author of The Night Swimmer

“Funny, desperate, sad, tender, suspenseful, intelligent, insightful, and full of nothing but heart, heart, heart.” —George Singleton, author of Between Wrecks