Allegiance

“For many people, ‘Allegiance’ is a noun, but in Gurney Norman’s hands, it is a verb—an active verb, an earthshaking process that rearranges the expectations of a homeplace, raises the windows of personal and epic history, and throws open doors of memory and imagination. Allegiance is a remarkable, eye-opening set of stories that affirm and defy time and place. It’s larger than one lifetime, resonating across generations, and inviting readers to reconsider their own allegiances.” — Sandra L. Ballard, Editor, Appalachian Journal

“We seldom find a book that we have hoped for like this one. These bright and humorous, sometimes sad yet always telling stories are both lyrical and dramatic; (Norman’s) sharpness of detail and flexibility of styles and tones remains central in his rich Appalachian world…. A blessing by a veteran author." — Larry Smith, New York Journal of Books

Gurney Norman blurs the lines between fiction and personal narrative in this masterful collection of forty stories. Both elegiac in their poetry of a bygone time and place and colloquial in their echoes of an Appalachian coal community, Norman’s stories pass easily and beautifully from one to the next. — Tennessee Libraries