Villages

Villages 

By Robert Inman 

Livingston Press, 2025 

Trade Paper: $19.95 

Genre: Fiction  

Reviewed by Frye Gaillard 

In this taut and beautifully crafted novel, Alabama native Robert Inman weaves a tale of surprises and secrets in a small Southern town, revealed by the homecoming of 21-year-old Jonas Boulware from the terrors of war in Afghanistan.  

Jonas suffers from PTSD, having returned to the familiar confines of Copernicus, a rural village where he now feels both welcome and estranged. As his story unfolds, we learn in fits and starts about things he saw and survived as a medic – the lunacy of a war where progress was difficult to measure, and in the end, the fundamental mission was simply, somehow, to remain alive.  

The IEDs – the enemy’s primary weapon of choice – did not discriminate between heroes and fools among the ranks of Boulware’s fellow Marines. And after his ordeal of combat ended, the nightmares that came every night soon made him wonder if he was losing his mind.  

None of this was easy for the people back home to understand, certainly not his abusive father or disillusioned mother, though in the end, Jonas does find his share of allies – a country doctor, a high school buddy, and an itinerant folk singer down on her luck who eventually becomes a romantic partner.  

Robert Inman’s gift for character is on full display in these pages, a reflection, I’ve always thought, of his own boyhood in Elba, Alabama. He grew up in the complicated shadow of World War II, when the Greatest Generation came home to a land that was suddenly unfamiliar. From race relations to the role of women in American life, the war, it seemed, had changed everything, tearing at old familiar patterns and forcing a kind of historical reckoning that could bring out both the best and the worst.   

Inman absorbed this disconcerting truth with a deeply felt and clear-eyed sympathy, reflected in a string of first-rate novels – Home Fires Burning, Old Dogs and Children, Dairy Queen Days, and more. He was published for a time by Little Brown, a national imprint where he was a critically acclaimed mid-list author. But as the book business changed, becoming more nakedly driven by profit, Inman struggled to find a home for Villages, his latest labor of love, until he turned to one of Alabama’s literary treasures. At Livingston Press, a publisher based at the University of West Alabama, editor Joe William Taylor has assembled an impressive list of ambitious novels and acclaimed short fiction.  

Inman fits well among the ranks of Livingston authors, taking his place with the likes of William Gay, Suzanne Hudson, and Christy Alexander Halberg, to give us some of the best fiction I have read in recent years. Certainly, in the case of Villages, we discover a literary page-turner in which even the noblest characters have secrets and flaws, and the worst are part of the path to redemption.  

Ultimately, the story of Jonas Boulware gives us hope while serving as a cautionary tale about the deadly foolishness of war. Jonas and Doc and Ray and Lyric – all the brave and troubled characters you will come to know in these pages – are likely to find a place in your heart long after the final page is turned. And in a novel as graceful as it is full of pain, Robert Inman reminds us again – quietly, as he always does – that he is one of our finest storytellers.  

Villages is brilliant, violent, tender, and full of love; a novel I am grateful to have read and one I absorbed in a single sitting, for I simply could not put it aside.  

Frye Gaillard’s latest book is Heroes and Other Mortals: Stories of Our Better Angels. He is a member of the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame.