“Southernmost engages my most deeply hidden fears and hopes . . . I love this book, and for it, I love Silas House.” –Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina Asher Sharp is willing to give up everything for what he believes in. Except his son. In the aftermath of a flood that washes away much of a small Tennessee town, evangelical preacher Asher Sharp offers shelter to two gay … preacher Asher Sharp offers shelter to two gay men. In doing so, he starts to see his life anew–and risks losing everything: his wife, locked into her religious prejudices; his congregation, which shuns Asher after he delivers a passionate sermon in defense of tolerance; and his young son, Justin, caught in the middle of what turns into a bitter custody battle.
With no way out but ahead, Asher takes Justin and flees to Key West, where he hopes to find his brother, Luke, whom he’d turned against years ago after Luke came out. And it is there, at the southernmost point of the country, that Asher and Justin discover a new way of thinking about the world, and a new way of understanding love.
In this stunning literary page-turner about judgment, courage, heartbreak, and change, bestselling author Silas House wrestles with the limits of belief, and with love and its consequences.
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Southernmost is an emotional tsunami. The classic themes of great literature written about family life are upended here in a modern twist as a father and son flee one life in search of another; as estranged brothers separated by time and their judgment of one another seek redemption. This is a story of faith lost and love found, and what we must throw overboard on the journey in order to keep moving. A treasure.
This beautifully crafted novel brims with a spirit of hopeful humanity as one man’s effort to make himself a better person casts ripples in the world around him.
This contemporary spiritual journey is also a love story and a classic road novel—a chase—filled with unrelenting suspense all the way. I have to say honestly that toward the end, you literally cannot put it down (well, you can’t put it down at the beginning, either!) as Southernmost moves from the flood-ravaged mountains of Tennessee down the eastern seaboard to the exotic locale of southern Florida. Perhaps because the cast of major characters is small, the degree of character development in this novel is extraordinary, from doubt-torn Asher, his rigid wife and loving granny Zelda back home in Kentucky; to Key West innkeeper Bell, an enormous woman in a muu-muu, a great cook and piano player extraordinaire with her own secrets; to her mysteriously sad and beautiful helper Evona who tends the jungly trees, plants, and flowers; to the most interesting of all, 9-year-old Justin who turns out to be a very unusual child, an old soul and mystic himself. With its themes of acceptance and equality, Southernmost holds a special meaning for America right now, with relevance even beyond its memorable story.
Silas House’s characters are as real to me as my own family. Southernmost is a novel for our time, a courageous and necessary book.
Southernmost engages my most deeply hidden fears and hopes. Silas House has all the gifts of a passionate storyteller, and to this book he adds the heartfelt convictions of a man willing to voice what we so seldom see in print—the ways in which with all good intentions we can mess up and go wrong, and only later try to sort out how we can win our own redemption. I love this book, and for it, I love Silas House.
Recommended by an American relative, Southernmost by the Kentuckian Silas House is his sixth book. Beginning with a flood, Asher Sharp is a Pentecostal preacher who invites two men into his home but his wife won’t allow them to stay despite their house being washed away. Realising his religiosity has fundamentally changed, Silas’ life undergoes major upheaval, leading him to go to the Florida Keys. An enjoyable literature fiction read that deals with pain, change and becoming our better selves, whilst avoiding being overly sentimental. A thoughtful provoking saga that captures the struggles in being human and spiritual, in a moving, eloquently style with a worthy four-star rating.
I enjoyed reading the book, particularly his descriptions of the natural world. But the character motivation has some inconsistencies. The narrator never acknowledges his hypocrisy in blaming his wife for something he later ends of doing as well.
One of the endings I thought the most logical is what happened.
What I didn’t see coming had to do with his brother. This was a great story!
LOVE! Did a zoom group interview with Lee Smith (delightful) and she recommended this book — TY!! A great book! Asher is a Pentecostal preacher in the Cumberland Valley in TN. They experience a flood and there is a lot of loss and displacement. When two young men, a gay couple, come to him for refuge he is sympathetic much to the chagrin of his community and congregation. It is a decisive moment for him and he determines that compassion and kindness trumps the rote rules he has been following. This causes much turmoil especially w/in his family. He and his wife are at odds and he ends up taking his son Justin to Key West. Asher has decided it is time to make amends with his older gay brother.
In Southernmost, Kentucky author (and treasure) Silas House creates a road trip, family drama, and mediation on the disparity between modern Christianity and its most rigid adherents. He begins with a flood in Tennessee, and a family on the brink.
Asher is the pastor of a small church in a small community. At the height of the flood, his son Justin disappears in search of his dog and Asher, Justin, and two other men help rescue a father and daughter. When Asher invites the men into his home, Asher’s wife Lydia objects.
More: https://daeandwrite.wordpress.com/2019/04/03/southernmost-by-silas-house/
Silas House is an amazing author!
This book was excellent. I would recommend this to anyone who enjoys great fiction.
Nobody writes the varied landscapes—physical, emotional, and cultural—of the American South quite like House does . . . a stirring, haunting tale of faith and family at a crossroads, woven through with his sumptuous descriptions and poetic sentences that demand to be lingered over and reread.
In Silas House’s moving new novel, a pastor wrestles with a crisis not just of faith, but of all the apparent certainties of his life: a crisis of marriage, of community, of fatherhood. This is a novel of painful, finally revelatory awakening, of fierce love and necessary disaster, of the bravery required to escape the prison of our days, to make a better and more worthy life.
I selected Southernmost by Silas House as my next read because it was chosen for the One Island, One Book event at our library in Key West in November. After a flood devastates a small town in Tennessee, evangelical preacher Asher Sharp is faced with a life-changing decision: Will he welcome a homeless gay couple into his home and his church? The prose is lovely, the pace thunderous, and the characters deeply moving. It is an important book for our times, but also a wonderful read.
The story was about an unusual and thoughtful topic, and I found that the creation of each character was done in a manner that we could sympathize with, possibly identify with, and yet also maybe find distressing and terrible. I liked the story very much, so unlike many other subjects chosen to fictionalize.
I felt the characters were real. I wanted to jump and help.
Very real picture of why America is divided.
At university, I took a course in religion with a professor who was ordained and had studied under Karl Barth. He told me that students come into his class with a naive belief and what he taught shook them for they had never viewed their faith community and beliefs from the ‘outside’. And, the professor continued, perhaps they will later return to their church and reaffirm it, this time with a deeper kind of faith.
But letting go of what one is taught, the beliefs held by one’s community is rare and hard. I watched church leaders endeavor to destroy a church over their perceptions of the denomination’s Social Principles as approving sin. It is more common for people to destroy what they fear than to change what they believe.
“None of us can know the mind of God. He’s too big for that.” Rev. Asher in Southernmost
I was drawn to read Southernmost by Silas House because it is about an Evangelical pastor who realizes that his narrow understanding of what God requires has created hate and bigotry, casting some into the outer darkness, and thus impairing his own soul.
When a flood leaves a gay couple homeless, Asher invites them into his house, a holy hospitality which his wife cannot tolerate. Asher has felt guilt over participating in his family’s and community’s condemnation of his brother Luke when he came out as gay. When the gay couple comes to worship, Asher tries to lead his flock and his family to an understanding of love and hospitality, but they are recalcitrant. He can only move on, leaving his church and his wife.
Asher’s wife Lydia keeps their son hostage, insistent that only she can raise him in the right values now that Asher has ‘gone crazy’. In fact, she has been so fearful that gayness runs in the family, she rejects her son’s sensitivity and non-violence. Unable to bear separation from his son, Asher rashly kidnaps him, then travels south to the Florida Keys to find his estranged brother. It is time to make amends for his sins.
Asher buys a moment in time alone with his son but knows it can’t be sustained. He has to return his son home and face the consequences, hoping his wife will be merciful and not vengeful.
The pacing of the novel is like a symphony that starts with an Allegro and immediate action, then settling into a slower Adagio before rising to a fast-moving Scherzo, and finally, resolves in the manner of Tchaikovsky with a slower, more internalized, final movement.
I was interested by the characters’ grappling with what God requires of us.
And what does the Lord require of you except to be just, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? Micah 6:8
“Hebrews says to entertain strangers,” Asher tells Lydia. “Love the sinner, hate the sin,” she responds. “You’ve gotten belief confused with judgment,” Asher responds; “They are our neighbors.”
Lydia holds steadfast to what she had been taught, resisting a changing world that tells her what she knows is wrong is now normal. She believes keeping Justin from Asher is a battle for her son’s soul.
Asher has come to doubt everything he grew up accepting; “I have been on the road to Damascus,” he thinks. His eyes have been opened. Paul had persecuted the Christians, and struck blind on the Damascus road saw the truth and converted to Christianity. Asher’s rejection of gays, including his own brother, was blindness. “You can use the Word to judge and condemn people or you can use it to love them.” Judging his brother became the seed of doubt in his faith.
Justin has his own faith, a sensitivity for the divine, seeing God in the Everything. Forgiveness is the easiest thing in the world, he believes. Forgetting is the hard part. Justin sees the greater truths and offers us a faith that transcends human institutions.
I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.
Silas House just gets better and better.