Set in a small, remote community in rural Tennessee in the years between the two world wars, it tells of John Wesley Rattner, a young boy, and Marion Sylder,All three are heroes of an intense and compelling celebration of values lost to time and industrialization.

An American classic, The Orchard Keeper is the first novel by one of America's finest,most celebrated novelists, author of the critically acclaimed Border Trilogy.

  Set in a small, remote community in rural Tennessee in the years between the two world wars, it tells of John Wesley Rattner, a young boy, and Marion Sylder, an outlaw and bootlegger who, unbeknownst to either of them,has killed the boy's father. Together with Rattner's Uncle Ather, who belongs to a former age in his communion with nature and his stoic independence, they enact a drama that seems born of the land itself. All three are heroes of an intense and compelling celebration of values lost to time and industrialization.