Novels
- The Year the Lights Came On (1976)
- After Eli (1981)
- Dark Thirty (1984)
- To Dance With the White Dog (1990)
- Shadow Song (1994)
- The Runaway (1997)
- The Kidnapping of Aaron Greene (1998)
- Taking Lottie Home (2000)
- The Valley of Light (2003)
- The Book of Marie (2007)
- Bogmeadow’s Wish (2011)
- The Greats of Cuttercane (2011)
- Song of the Vagabond Bird (2014)
- The King Who Made Paper Flowers (2016)
- The Forever Wish of Middy Sweet (2020)
Picture Books
- To Whom the Angel Spoke (1991)
Novellas
- The Seventh Mirror (2013)
Non fiction
- Special Kay (2000)
Novels Book Covers
Picture Books Book Covers
Novellas Book Covers
Non fiction Book Covers
Terry Kay Books Overview
The Year the Lights Came On
First published in 1976, The Year the Lights Came On was Terry Kay’s debut novel. Revolving around the electrification of rural northeast Georgia shortly after the end of World War II, the novel has become a classic coming of age story. Kay, now an acclaimed writer with an international following, has reread the novel with the eyes of a seasoned storyteller. Cutting here and adding there, Kay has enriched an already highly comical and poignant work. The Year the Lights Came On is ready to find its place in the hearts of a new generation.
After Eli
After Eli is the story of three women who encounter the most formidable of dangers an enchanting man. Though strangers are rare in the small town of Yale, and a recent double murder is still unsolved, itinerant actor Michael O’Rear wins over the people of the remote Appalachian village. Intrigued by the legend of eli’s hidden money, Michael uses his actor’s talents and his gift of hypnotically lyrical gab to win the empathy, and then the hearts, of the three Pettit women: Rachel, alone since her husband Eli left seven years before, her daughter, Sarah, and even her distrusting older sister, Dora. Each woman takes pleasure in Michael, whose charm and wit draw them inexorably into his play of madness a drame of psychological horror that threatens the weak and unsuspecting.
To Dance With the White Dog
Sam Peek’s children are worried. Since that ‘saddest day’ when Cora, his beloved wife of fifty seven good years, died, no one knows how he will survive. How can this elderly man live alone on his farm? How can he keep driving his dilapidated truck down to the fields to care for his few rows of pecan trees? And when Sam begins telling his children about a dog as white as the pure driven snow that seems invisible to everyone but him his children think that grief and old age have finally taken their toll. But whether the dog is real or not, Sam Peek ‘one of the smartest men in the South when it comes to trees’ outsmarts them all. Sam and the White Dog will dance from the pages of this bittersweet novel and into your heart, as they share the mystery of life, and begin together a warm and moving final rite of passage. Winner of the Southeastern Library Association’s Outstanding Author Award.
Shadow Song
In the summer of 1955, Madison Lee ‘Bobo’ Murphy was a waiter at the Catskills’ Pine Hill Inn. A rural Southerner, he had never heard the word meshugge until Avrum Feldman a retired New York City furrier became his unlikely friend. For Bobo, nothing about that special time and place ever lost its glow: Avrum’s obsession with the haunting voice of a famous opera diva, music that no one else could hear; the exotic mingling of Yiddish and German in the dining room; and the girl he met and loved. In everyone’s life, Avrum claimed, there is one grand, undeniable moment that never stops mattering. For Bobo, it was his first glimpse of beautiful Amy Lourie. But, for a wealthy Jewish girl and a Georgia farm boy, the summer had to end, leaving Bobo with the pain of lost love. Nearly forty years later, his children grown and marriage comfortably routine, Bobo comes north once more; there, amidst the haunting hints of Amy’s presence, she unexpectedly appears. Nothing has dimmed the passion of their youth, yet two lifetimes and a thousand Catskills sunsets stand between who they were and who they have become. The barriers between them are different now. But mysteriously, miraculously, Bobo reawakens the dream of a love larger than himself…
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The Runaway
Tom and Son Jesus spend their days dreaming, fishing , and trying to escape work. But their fun comes to an abrupt halt when they discover a human bone, which later turns out to be part of the skeletal remains of Son Jesus’ long missing father. As sheriff Frank Rucker, a World War II hero, begins an investigation into remains, he unmasks the racially motivated killer known only as Pegleg. The sheriff’s findings divide the people of Overton County, forcing a surprising conclusion or beginning of justice. Set in the 1940’s and using the relationships of two boys one black and the other white as a springboard for the begining of desegregation in the South, The Runaway examines the joys, sorrows, conflicts, and racial disharmony of their historical biased environment.
The Kidnapping of Aaron Greene
Aaron Greene is barely a year out of high school when he disappears on his way to work at a powerful Atlanta bank. The kidnappers demand ten million dollars, with one condition: the money must come from the bank, not Aaron’s parents. But the bank refuses to pay. Suddenly Aaron’s case is at the center of a storm of outrage that sweeps the nation while the shy young mailroom boy waits in an environment he never would have expected, guarded by people who care nothing for his ransom money.
Taking Lottie Home
Taking Lottie Home is a story of generations bound inexplicably together by ‘the odd way that life, or circumstance, bumps people around, sends them colliding into one another.’ It is an elegantly written story of love given, love returned, and love remembered that no reader will ever forget. When Foster Lanier and Ben Phelps are released from a professional baseball team in 1904, it is the only experience they have in common until they meet a runaway a girl woman named Lottie Parker on the train that takes them from Augusta, Georgia, and away from their dreams of greatness. Foster will marry her and father her son. Ben will escort her home. And Lottie will change the lives of everyone she meets from the day she runs away until she finally finds the place where she belongs. The story of Lottie reveals the life of a rare woman who never completely loses the innocence of her dreams although she leaves home as a prostitute and works the girlie tent in a traveling carnival. Her marriage to Foster and the birth of her son are part of her dream. Having Ben care for her following Foster’s death, being accepted into the home of Margaret Phelps, Ben’s mother, and meeting Arthur Ledford, the father of Ben’s fiancee are fragments of the dream as well. With a turn of the century setting affected by lingering memories of the Civil War and Reconstruction and by startling promises of a new world electricity, the telephone, the airplane, the automobile Terry Kay returns with a story that honors the amazing capacity we have to love and care for one another that earned him international praise for his novel To Dance with the White Dog.
The Valley of Light
A lyrical and poignant gift from one of America’s great storytellers. On a sunny summer day in 1948, Noah Locke arrives in Bowerstown, a small North Carolina community bordered by lakes and set deep in The Valley of Light. A quiet, simple man and a war veteran, Noah has a mystical gift for fishing, yet he remains haunted by the war and by the terrible scenes he witnessed when his infantry unit liberated Dachau. His wandering doing odd jobs and catching fish for sale or trade is both an escape from his past and a search for a place to call home. In the valley, Noah is initially treated with amuseme*nt by the locals he meets at Taylor Bowers’s general store until he begins fishing. Once they see his almost magical skills, however, he becomes the talk of the valley and is urged to stay long enough to participate in the annual school fishing contest. He agrees, accepting a job offer by Taylor to paint his store when he isn’t filling orders for fish. He finds lodging in an abandoned shack by a small lake the locals call the Lake of Grief and, also, the Lake of No Fish, because they think all the fish have disappeared. Noah knows they are wrong. Beneath the water is a warrior bass waiting to test Noah’s gift. In the way that innocence creates powerful events, Noah meets Eleanor Cunningham, a young widow whose husband supposedly killed himself after returning home from the war. Over the course of a week, Noah will be led into the secret lives of the residents of The Valley of Light, will join them as they mourn a tragedy, and will experience a miracle that will guide him home at last. Luminous, memorable, and deeply moving, ‘The Valley of Light‘ is the finest work to datefrom a brilliant storyteller.
Bogmeadow’s Wish
When Cooper Coghlan arrives in Ireland with the cremains of his grandfather, Finn Coghlan, he has one instruction: Let my ashes blow in the wind. You’ll know the place when you come to it. I’ll be there, telling you. He also has tendermemories of his grandfather’s exaggerated stories of Irish wonder and magic stories of leprechauns and legends and the mysterious power of fate. But he does not have the story of why his grandfather left Ireland as a young man. Mesmerized by his romantic vision of Ireland, Cooper begins his search with the unknowing help of friends in America who have employed a charming, down on his luck Irish actor named Sandy McAfee to con his way into Cooper’s life as his guide. Yet neither is prepared for the presence of Kathleen O Reilly, a public relations specialist whose tour on behalf of the NewTree campaign is eerily parallel to the travels that Sandy plots in leading Cooper on his hunt for his grandfather’s ghost. And in those landmarks Waterford, Youghal, Cork, Killarney, the Ring of Kerry, Tralee, Kenmare, Dingle the fate of the Irish that Finn Coghlan talked of magically brings Cooper and Kathleen together. Yet, there is a truth between the two of them that not even the enchanting tale of Finn McCool and Sally Cavanaugh, or of Patrick the Believer, can resolve. For that, Cooper must use the one gift bestowed on him as a child by his grandfather Bogmeadow’s Wish.
To Whom the Angel Spoke
To Whom the Angel Spoke tells the story of Christ’s birth through the perspective of three shepherds outside of Bethlehem. Distinctively different in every aspect of their personalities, the three hear a voice one night, and because they believe what the voice tells them, they are alike. In witnessing the Christ child, each understands the event in his own special way. In this touching tale, Kay gets to the heart of the Christmas story, while also acknowledging the differences among Christians. We are all different people, we all feel different things. Here we have something to bring us together.
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