This Is God's Country

Two baby boys are born on the same winter day in a small city in North Carolina.  On opposite sides of town.  When they meet—at university, not in their hometown—they fall in love and start planning a life together.  Kit, the white boy, is rich; Gabriel, the black boy, is poor.  Can they make their relationship work?  Can they build a productive—and safe—life together?

Not back home, they decide.  But New York City is another place entirely, and it draws them to it like a magnet.  Their new life is happy and satisfying—with lots of bumps in the road, of course: a forced separation because of career choices, rampant promiscuity during their time apart, the deaths of friends in the 1980s, career ups and downs.  But all of it they take in their stride until one phone call changes everything.

When Kit and Gabriel are summoned back to their hometown in 1990, they haven’t an inkling of the challenges they’ll face, or the transformation of their lives that is about to unfold.  Readers get to join our heroes as they make tough choices and learn how richly rewarding a life of service can be.  THIS IS GOD’S COUNTRY is tender, funny, erotic, romantic, honest, and timely.

Readers of the Love Trilogy will welcome back Bruce K Beck’s voice—generous and irreverent in equal measure.  But this time the characters and their journeys are quite different from Bobby and Sunshine.  This time our heroes have to confront bigotry and intolerance head-on.  This time they must fight for their very survival in a town—in a nation—that is slow to change.