Having just murdered his lover, Loyal Blant, the eldest son of a large American rural family, leaves his home forever, self-exiled like a modern Cain. Through successive disappointments, defeats, and the endless loneliness that haunts him like an Erinys for his crime, Loyal traverses the second half of the twentieth century in the antipodes of the American dream, while his own, blood that he tainted with blood, also follow parallel paths of loneliness and ruin, without ever converging their fates. A stunning saga around the familiar pattern of solitude and human suffering, written by the unique worthy successor of Faulkner.