Sounder, the great coon dog, has the neck and shoulders of a bulldog and the melodious bay of a hound. When he trees a coon, his voice rolls through the moonlit night and across the flatlands, louder than any dog's in the whole countryside.

But Sounder cannot save his master—the poor black sharecropper driven to steal for his hungry wife and children. Sounder cannot save him from the sheriff's pose, nor can he save him from fate.

For fate pursues them both, master and coon dog, mauling each of them in its cruel, impersonal jaws while the boy who loves the two of them is forced to bear his sorrow like a man, though he is still a child.

The power of William H. Armstrong's rose and of James Barkley's illustrations quite simply speaks for itself. And though the story burns with indignation, it climbs to moments of nobility and resignation that return, in memory, like a final benediction or the closing of a song.

From the dust jacket