"Harry is a medical student: it is his birthday and to relieve his inappropriate loneliness a friend takes him to an evening party. There Harry meets Charlotte: what begins as a sympathetic friendship grows, for the man at least, into a most frantic love. Harry throws up his career; Charlotte leaves her husband and family. Once Harry has chosen his new life there is no looking back.
Against this William Faulkner places the story of a convict who, when he is carried away from imprisonment by a mammoth flooding of the Mississippi, obstinately refuses to escape from the one world he knows.
Two stories, told in alternate chapters, compose a novel as suggestive of prime human motives as anything this great author has written." -- Inside cover