Common Ground

The love story where the two men get to keep the life.Marsh Meriwether was twenty-one years old, carrying a folding table through a crowded fraternity house, when the rest of his life got out of a Jeep Grand Wagoneer and walked in wearing a borrowed jacket. The man was Sumpter Hiott - a careful, buttoned-down economist from the South Carolina Lowcountry - and across the thirty years that followed, the two of them would build something the world had told them, in a hundred ways, loud and quiet, that they were not allowed to have. They build it anyway: a country veterinary practice, a horse farm raised out of a wrecked and starving place in rural Alabama, and a marriage no courthouse would grant and no church would bless, kept in the only currency the era left them - a survivorship deed, a coffee can at the end of a drive, a hand held one beat too long. Told decades on, in the plainspoken, unhurried voice of a man who has earned the right to say the truest things plainly, Common Ground is a tender and quietly triumphant novel about love held in the open at last, about chosen family, and about the long, ordinary work of making a home on ground that was never supposed to be yours.