The Holiday Season

The Story

Simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking, The Holiday Season and its companion piece, Love at the End of the Year, are tender ruminations on the nature of family, the power of love, and a particularly complicated time of year. In The Holiday Season, the Posey men are still trying to figure out how to be a family three years after the death of the wife and mother who bound them together. As the year winds to a close and the holidays threaten to unearth the usual myriad of emotions and memories, hairline fractures in the Poseys' relationships finally splinter and crack over what should be, but never is, a simple question: where to spend the holidays. Jeff, the patriarch and a retired Alabama politician, wants everything to remain how it was when his wife was alive, but his oldest son, Ted, a successful lawyer, thinks it's time to establish fresh traditions. Caught in the middle is the younger son, Frank, a mostly failed actor who narrates in a voice at once comic, penetrating, and regretful. As Thanksgiving turns to Christmas and the conflict between his father and brother reaches its breaking point, Frank is finally forced to choose between them. The second novella, Love at the End of the Year, is an intoxicating tale that weighs up love in all its many forms over the course of a single, magical Alabama New Year's Eve. Michael Knight's fiction has been widely praised by critics and writers but here is the book that will provide him with a larger stage--a book to be savored by anyone who's ever survived the holidays.