Carry Me Back

Just released from prison, Webb Pritchard - a banjo-playing bluegrass and country music lover, who got put away for trying to protect what was his - goes looking for a new life. On his way home, he buys a picturesque old banjo he nicknames Lil Darlin'. In Telluride, Colorado, he hears tell of a bluegrass festival where he might be able to pick a little, maybe find a steady gig. And then, away off in a corner during the festival, Webb Pritchard - enchanted banjo in hand - finds himself displaced...to 1951. And when he turns around, he is face-to-face with Hank Williams - Senior. Carry Me Back, Laura Watt's winning first novel, is on one level a story of the romance of country music - about one man's mission to preserve the true-gold purity of the music, threatened today by big business and ersatz authenticity. On another, it's a love triangle between a man, the past he adores, and a woman he is coming to love.