RUN WITH THE HORSEMEN is called fiction, but it is a book of life. To read this book is as dangerous as living - it is delicate, raw, charming, and so honest it makes your teeth hurt. It's a boy's account of growing up on an ancestral farm in Georgia, a rueful, humorous story of the people in one rural county, but the telling cuts so deep it breaks through to the universal.

The Boy could remind you of Tom Sawyer or Holden Caulfield, but he is Porter Osborne. He's indelible, as are the other characters who populate this special place called Brewton County, which will be real forever - thanks to Ferrol Sams.