National Book Award Winner

Paris Trout

by Pete Dexter

Summary

In a small Georgia town in the years after World War II, a respected white merchant commits a brutal act of violence against a Black family and then watches the community arrange itself around his denial. Dexter writes in clean, unsentimental sentences that lay bare the machinery of Jim Crow justice and the slow disintegration of a marriage caught inside it. The novel reads like a moral autopsy of an entire town.

Historical Context & Significance

Dexter was a former newspaper columnist; the book's spare prose was praised for its unflinching look at institutionalized racism.