Sign-In
Cart
Our Talk
Paperback
General FictionLiterary Fiction
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jun 24 2026
Pages: 268
Weight: 0.80
Height: 0.61 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
When linguist Avi Price drives down from Galveston to a fading marsh settlement called Morrow Point, he expects a routine inquiry-an elderly woman, a few remembered words, maybe a fragment of a forgotten dialect. What he finds instead is Lum Flinders, a sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued woman who speaks of her people's language only as our talk-and who seems to know exactly how much of herself she's willing to let a stranger hear.
Avi comes for language. Lum offers something far more complicated.
In a house that smells of frying oil, boiled fruit, and old weather, Avi begins documenting what he can: the rhythms of Lum's speech, the phrases she refuses to repeat, the way she watches the road after dark. But the deeper he's drawn into her world-into clinic visits, grocery runs, funeral kitchens, and nights on the porch-the more he realizes that the survival of a language is tangled in the survival of a community, its griefs, its humor, its secrets, and its dead.
And in Morrow Point, the dead are never entirely gone.
As storms gather over the marsh and old stories surface, Avi witnesses exchanges in our talk that aren't meant for him, moments when Lum and others slip into a register English can't hold. When English done all it can, Lum tells him, our talk sometimes carries the rest.
OUR TALK is a haunting, deeply human novel about the fragile transmissions between generations, the ethics of listening, and the thin line between documentation and intrusion. It's a story of language as inheritance, as shelter, as work, as weather-and of the people who keep a culture alive not through fluency, but through presence, memory, and the stubborn, ordinary acts of care that bind a place together.
Perfect for readers of Jesmyn Ward, Marilynne Robinson, Kent Haruf, and Brandon Taylor, this novel invites you into a world where the smallest utterances carry the weight of history, and where the most important truths are spoken low, at night, when the porch light is off.
Also from
Bryant, Tim
Also in
General Fiction
Elizabeth Spencer: Novels & Stories (Loa #344): The Voice at the Back Door / The Light in the Piazza / Knights and Dragons / Stories
Spencer, Elizabeth
Hardcover
Anniversaries, Volume 2: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl, April 1968-August 1968
Johnson, Uwe
Paperback
Selected Writings: Robert Musil: Young Torless, Three Women, the Perfecting of a Love, and Other Writings
Musil, Robert
Agee, Joel
Paperback
Before Gatsby: The First Twenty-Six Stories
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
Bruccoli, Matthew J.
Baughman, Judith
Paperback