When Percy Harding, Goliath’s most important citizen, is discovered dead by the railroad tracks outside of town one perfect autumn afternoon, no one can quite believe it’s really happened. Percy, the president of the town’s world-renowned furniture company, had seemed invincible. Only Rosamond Rogers, Percy’s secretary, may have had a glimpse of how and why this great man has fallen, and that glimpse tugs at her, urges her to find out more.
Percy isn’t the first person to leave Rosamond—everybody seems to, from her husband, Hatley, who walked out on her years ago, to her complicated daughter Agnes, whose girlhood bedroom was papered with maps of the places she wanted to escape to. The town itself is Rosamond’s anchor, but it is beginning to quiver with the possibility of change. The high school girls are writing suicide poetry, the town’s young, lumbering sidewalk preacher is courting Rosamond’s daughter, a troubled teenage boy plans to burn Main Street to the ground, and the furniture factory itself—the very soul of Goliath—threatens to close.
In the wake of the town’s undoing, Rosamond seeks to reunite the grief-shaken community. Goliath—a story of loss and love, of forgiveness and letting go—is a lyrical swoon of a novel by an exceptionally talented newcomer.
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"Absorbing story of the death of a North Carolina furniture town. Susan Woodring has amazing dexterity with point of view; the novel's main character is the town of Goliath itself."
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Kim (4 out of 5 stars)