"It was rightfully his home, he said, because if he left, as he once did, other voices, other places, lost and blurred voices would scratch at his dreams".

This is the strange story of Joel Harrison Knox, a 13-year-old boy from New Orleans who, after his mother's death, travels to the rural South of America to live with his unknown father.
This first novella by Truman Capote, published when the author was just 24 years old, is much more than a coming-of-age novel of the southern gothic genre, that is, the fiction of the American South. In a lush and mysterious area, with eccentric characters and dilapidated mansions of another era, Capote's captivatingly atmospheric writing, full of poetry and allegories, takes the reader on a dream-like journey; for the demolition of what haunts us, the search for identity, and ultimately the freedom that comes with realization.