Awakening (Martin)

The Dead Don't Dance is a bittersweet yet triumphant love story - a tale of one man's journey through the darkness of despair and into the light of hope.

In a sleepy rural town in South Carolina, Dylan and Maggie Styles are a young couple in love, preparing eagerly for the birth of their first son. But events take a tragic turn in the delivery room, and their child is delivered stillborn. When Maggie hemorrhages and slips into a coma, Dylan slips into what can only be described as a walking coma, holding vigil at his beloved wife’s bedside.

Usually tough and self-reliant, an outdoorsman and a farmer, Dylan finds that everything he has known is suddenly thrown into doubt. Refusing to give up on Maggie’s recovery, a devastated Dylan takes a job as an English professor in order to pay for Maggie’s medical bills. Dylan connects with his students despite himself and offers hope to others amid his own disappointment and grief. As Dylan waits for some change in Maggie's condition, he reflects on his life and hers.

Through friends and grace-filled moments of insight, Dylan slowly begins to heal, but it will take a second tragedy - and an anxious period of wrestling with God - to truly awaken him from his stupor and open him up to a new life.

• New York Times best-selling author Charles Martin’s debut novel
• Full-length emotive Southern fiction
• Book one of the Awakening series
• Book two: Maggie