Catbird — Stephen March

"On certain nights when the moon was full and Lavis was on his way to getting blind drunk, he would drive Zeb out to his old homeplace on the Choctoosie River."

So begins the story of Zeb Dupree, a musician struggling to find his spiritual and emotional bearings in the wake of his father's suicide and his own failed marriage. Zeb's Father, and alcoholic sharecropper, had been obsessed with the loss of his family's farm. This obsession became, for Zeb, a "parable about the destruction of dreams." During his teens and early twenties, Zeb managed to rise above his impoverished background. However, through a series of losses, his life spirals downward until he finds himself living in a bus behind a junkyard--lonely and confused, with only his magical fiddle for solace.

Against a richly textured Southern background, Stephen March has fashioned a story of one man's search for redemption and his escape from his father's legacy.