Heathen Valley

Heathen Valley, Romulus Linney's haunting and original novel, was born from the church histories of the Valle Crucius mission in western North Carolina. Told in four parts, it is a story set in an almost unknown valley, "Heathen, a Valley That Forgot God." With a quiet, muscular violence and biblical cadence, Linney takes us into the 1850s, where an idealistic bishop from New England and a life-whipped, sorrowful transient named Starns struggle to win souls and transform the valley. Widely reviewed when it was first published in 1962 and selected as an alternative for the Book-of-the-Month Club, Romulus Linney's first novel, Heathen Valley, was never reprinted and has never before been in paperback.