The Winter Rider

They meet by chance on a Georgia road: William Wesley Johns, a middle-aged novelist with a manuscript to mail, and the girl with two fiddle cases who hitches a ride. In a lonesome spot the fan belt breaks, so Johns and the girl, Jo, who is as independent as a bird and as spontaneously musical, set out through the woods to find help. What they find instead is an absorbing adventure, a cast of backwoods people, and a strange journey down a haunting river. The bizarre events among the primitive people they meet in the woods parallel the discovery by Johns of the subterranean realities of his own life, which he has tried to ignore. At the center is the girl, intuitive and unpredictable, who is responsible both for the adventure and for the discovery. Brilliantly conceived and executed, The Winter Rider was originally published by Lippincott in 1960, when Berry Fleming was 61 years old. The novel is filled with the spellbinding imagery and introspection that mark Mr. Fleming’s serious fiction.