The Ancient Hours

Michael Bible’s tragic and sublime third novel tells the story of a massacre in a small Southern town and expands into a heart-breaking meditation on guilt, trauma and redemption.

The Ancient Hours … packs a wallop -New York Times Book Review

The Ancient Hours is brilliant. -Bud Smith, author of Work

Bible is a fantastic writer. -Kevin Wilson, author of Nothing to See Here

Harmony, North Carolina is a typical town-full of saints and sinners you can’t tell apart…

Its history echoes with lynchings and shootings; mob violence and vigilante justice. But those are just whispers of a past lost to time. The summer of 2000 was different. Iggy in the Baptist church. Gasoline and a match. Twenty-five people dead. This, Harmony couldn’t forget.

Told in a kaleidoscope of timelines and voices, Michael Bible examines every dimension of a tragic but all-too-American story in The Ancient Hours. The victims, witnesses, perpetrators, and condemned comingle and evolve as the passage of time works its way through their lives. What emerges is a fable of the American South in the highest tradition- soaring, tragic, and eternally striving for redemption.