The Marriage Bed

A freak accident comes on the heels of a startling revelation—laying bare the foundation of a marriage, and a husband is left to grapple with the aftermath.
A poetry professor at a small college in Asheville, NC, Asa Flowers, comes home one stormy evening to find his wife Betsy inexplicably distraught. As the evening goes on, the couple end up in a heated argument that sends Asa to sleep out in their garage apartment for the first time in twenty-five years of marriage. The next morning, he wakes to blue sky and an altered world.
Unfolding over a few tense weeks and told from multiple points of view, this novel explores how a tragedy can assume as many shapes as the people it touches. Asa finds himself reckoning with torn feelings about his marriage and confusion about how to proceed in his complicated relationships with his adult children. As he gradually absorbs revelations—so much he didn't know or understand during his long marriage—he finds himself drawn uneasily toward a new world, one in which he must shed much of his old identity if he is to survive, and more important, rededicate himself to being a father.

Tommy Hays is an acclaimed Southern writer, whose fiction grows out of his emotional connections to places he's lived and known—Greenville, South Carolina; Asheville, North Carolina; and Atlanta. His novels are The Pleasure Was Mine (St. Martin's Press 2005), In the Family Way (Random House, 1999), Sam's Crossing (Atheneum 1992), and YA novel What I Came to Tell You (Egmont, USA 2013). He has published stories, profiles and book reviews in magazines, newspapers and literary journals such as Redbook, Our State, The Atlanta Constitution, The Charlotte Observer, Smoky Mountain Living, Still:The Journal, The Chattahoochee Review, and storySouth. The winner of many literary awards, he is founder and former Executive Director of the Great Smokies Writing Program, UNC Asheville's community writing program as well as Lecturer Emeritus in the Master of Liberal Arts program. He is based in Asheville, NC.