In a working-class city with roots deep in the Confederacy, five men will endure seven deadly weeks that will forever alter their perceptions of the world. These haunting events transpiring over the summer of 1948 will irrevocably mark their understanding of race and responsibility in postwar America.

Laconic, nuanced, and stylish, master storyteller Jack Cady's depiction of mid-century Louisville, Kentucky, is fraught with racial tension, precise detail, and the delicate, figurative ghosts of the actions and inactions of the past.

From Jack Cady, award-winning author of The Hauntings of Hood Canal and Ghosts of Yesterday, comes the astonishing final novel Rules of '48, a stirring semi-autobiographical examination of changing social conventions and the development of the American conscience in the aftermath of the greatest war in history. Jack Cady died in January 2004, but his insightful vision of American life lives on in Rules of '48.

"For more than 30 years, Cady has been one of America's great chroniclers of characters and places . . . . Few writers can capture the rhythms of blue-collar speech as well as Cady does . . . "
—Publishers Weekly

"Jack Cady is above all, a writer of great, unmistakable integrity and profound feeling . . . Jack Cady's is a voice we need to hear."
—Peter Straub