The Basket Weaver - Paperback

by Terry Wayne Carpenter (Author)

Thomas Wainwright grows up knowing exactly where the world ends: the Kingdom Hall door, the borders of field service territory, his father's silence - which is where most things end.

Raised inside the Jehovah's Witnesses in the Ozarks of the 1970s, Thomas learns early that language belongs to the Organization - that words exist to shape behavior, silence dissent, and keep the faithful compliant. When a summer romance becomes a congregation scandal, Thomas is brought before a judicial committee that will determine the shape of his future. What survives the verdict is not what he expected.

Over four decades, Thomas rebuilds his life through the art of basket weaving - split white oak worked by hand into something patient and precise, the one language no one taught him and no one can take away. Along the way he loses people to the institution, finds philosophy in borrowed rooms, and carries a question he cannot put down: can the love that tore his family apart also put it back together?

The Basket Weaver is a novel about the violence language does when it calls itself truth, and what a person must build - by hand, alone, over a lifetime - to survive it. Spanning four decades and four kinds of love, it is an intimate, philosophically rich portrait of one man's passage from obedience to freedom, and the cost of every step between.

For readers of Marilynne Robinson, Tara Westover, and Cormac McCarthy.