Summary: A richly textured coming-of-age story about fathers and sons, home and family, recalling classics by Thomas Wolfe and William Styron, by a powerful new voice in fiction Just before Henry Aster's birth, his father—outsized literary ambition and pregnant wife in tow—reluctantly returns to the remote North Carolina town in which he was improbably raised and installs his young family in an immense house of iron and glass perched on the shoulder of a mountain. There, Henry grows up under the desk of this fierce and brilliant man. But when a death in the family tips his father toward a fearsome unraveling, what was once a young son's reverence is poisoned, and Henry flees, not to return until years later when he, too, must go home again. Mesmeric in its prose and mythic in its sweep, The Barrowfields is an extraordinary debut about the darker side of devotion, the limits of forgiveness, and the reparative power of shared pasts