"Fearless. In prose that is lush and unflinching, it explores the entanglement of desire and shame, power and cruelty, biblical landscapes and the American South." — Chloe Benjamin

A masterful return from one of the greats of contemporary American fiction.

In 1970s Memphis, two boys lock in battle. They're best friends, but when your body floods with longing, sometimes all you can do is fight. Then one summer, at a Christian camp, Rory Singleton meets a fellow teenager who shows him the wonders of dragonflies and sex— episodes of stolen pleasure that awaken a hunger he'll spend a lifetime trying to bury.

As an adult, Rory is the pastor of a thriving megachurch, his life built on secrets, careful silences, and furtive encounters. But when he's sent to Africa to promote a homophobic crusade, the contradictions become unbearable. A reckoning begins—one that will take him from the pulpit to underground queer spaces, from respectability to radical honesty, from denial to a raw, dangerous freedom, and finally to a confrontation with everything he's built and everyone he's betrayed.

From the author of the award-winning The Coming Storm comes a searing novel in the tradition of James Baldwin and Flannery O'Connor—a devastating portrait of American evangelicalism's war on desire, and one man's fight to reclaim the pleasure and truth he's been denied.