Thomas McNamee

From reviews of "A Story of Deep Delight":

"A Story of Deep Delight" brilliantly evokes the human and natural history of the Tennessee-Mississippi border country....A remarkably convincing novel...."A Story of Deep Delight" comes straight from the heart, to celebrate a unique yet quintessentially American terrain and the unforgettable people who lived there for almost two centuries.
--Washington Post

McNamee has written a masterpiece first time out....[His] ear for dialect and accent is unnerving....The writer's ability to create believable, intriguing characters is equally good. It is a rare pleasure to be able to tell others about such a "find" as this delightful story....[Its] cultural scope gives Delight claim to be nominated for the great Tennessee novel. How did a local boy like McNamee (or Twain or Shakespeare for that matter) learn to write like this?...McNamee's surpassing ability is under-writing, letting the story carry the magical flow rather than inserting himself as the genius storyteller. You don't realize how good he is until you are finished and realize what has happened to you.
--Nashville Banner

Thomas McNamee has written not only the Memphis novel...this broad-based epic may be the Southern novel....There is so much to this novel, so many fleshed-out characters, so many emotions jangled, so much history brought to life that it's hard to encapsulate it or even comment on it succinctly. The monumental sweep of the story flows as effortlessly as the Mississippi....The tidal swell of the tale is biblical....The opening chapters are as lyrical and compelling as any in fiction...luminous and memorable, crafted by a master storyteller...reminiscent of [Gabriel Garcia] Marquez in its epiphanic quality, in its ability to surprise and transport. McNamee's compassion is boundless and wise....It feels right, the way fiction should...a long, involving tale with history and imagination so finely interwoven that they become a third thing, and that thing is art. McNamee's vision...has the immediacy of truth....McNamee has given Memphis its true memorial, a work of art that breathes with the history and life of the city....A Story of Deep Delight is just that.
--Memphis Commercial Appeal

A masterful dramatization of the brutal tides of history, laced with stories of love and loyalty. A sure bet for historical novel fans and readers who relish large-scale, well-constructed, and mind-expanding fiction.
--Booklist

Thomas McNamee's "A Story of Deep Delight" will haunt your dreams and cause you to wake up rejoicing. It will stagger you with its grace, its breadth of vision, and deliver the promise of its title in spades. It will, among so many other things, help to heal the wounds of history, restoring the magic; and it will prompt you to make claims for its powers even more emphatic than these. The novel is, quite simply, a masterpiece.
--Steve Stern

To what extent is white Americans' antagonism toward blacks, Indians, nonwhites bred in the bone? What is the cost of "progress" in an inhuman society? These somber questions thread through McNamee's haunting, beautifully written multigenerational novel.
--Publishers Weekly

At a time when we have grown accustomed to first novels that offer modern, peripatetic heroes, Thomas McNamee twists our expectations. His heroes--the first of them born in the eighteenth century--shift over the decades, while he holds place constant. The result is a deft and deeply felt saga by a writer whose depths of sympathy and passion for nature are felt throughout.
--Brad Leithauser

McNamee makes Memphis glow with its accomplishments, failures, and human glory.
--Thomas McGuane

McNamee has been a lyricist and a poet, a magazine journalist, an influential conservationist, an important biographer of the grizzly bear. And now he gives us this serious, ambitious novel. Thank God the guy doesn't also sing and dance.
--David Quammen

I was held to the page from the start. Saying I loved it is not strong enough praise. The wealth of detail, the richness of the characters, the grand sweep of the thing!
--William Hjortsberg

Thomas McNamee's new book does not traffic in bashfulness. What we have here is a shoot-the-moon attempt at fiction on the grand scale...."A Story of Deep Delight" is an ambitious and big-hearted effort....By any reckoning, Thomas McNamee has written a story of notable merit.
--Jackson, Miss., Clarion-Ledger