In 1931 William Music is making his way back home to Virginia when he hops off a freight train in Switch County, Kentucky, to find something to eat. For eleven cents-all the money in his pocket-he buys a soda bottle's worth of moonshine. Farther down the road, he takes two turnips and a handful of string beans from a kitchen garden and beds down for the night in a haystack. It is still dark out when he wakes up to a dog licking his forehead and a man pointing a pistol in his face. Despite the awkward introduction, Music and Regus Bone are soon friends. Bone is a guard at Hardcastle Coal Co., whose owner will do anything to keep his employees from unionizing. For the irresistible wage of three dollars a day, Music-outfitted with an ancient, misfiring revolver and a holster made from a feed sack-hires on as a watchman despite his queasy feelings about the job. His attraction to the young widow of a miner killed by a former guard only deepens his discomfort, and when he and Bone catch a pair of union organizers, they make a decision that will change their lives and Switch County forever. Inspired by real events, Hardcastle is a stirring tribute to the power of friendship and family in a time and place in which the price of integrity is more than a man on his own can bear.
"Remarkable, a book about something that matters . . . Lionel Trilling has said that a great book reads us. . . . When I finished reading Hardcastle, I thought, so this is what he was talking about. This is what he meant."
Raymond Carver
"Wonderfully compelling . . . Mr. Yount has a touch that makes his book far more than the sum of its parts."
The New York Times
"From now on, there are bound to be two classics of the Great Depression-The Grapes of Wrath and Hardcastle."
