Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941)
By Carson McCullers

Reflections in a Golden Eye, published just a year after the debut Carson McCullers's masterpiece, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, confirmed the author's youthful genius. Set on an army base in the American South of the 1930s, Reflections in a Golden Eye tells the story of Captain Penderton, his tempestuous and flirtatious wife, Leonora, and the passions and jealousies that ensue with the arrival of Major Morris Langdon and the fragile Alison Langdon. The novel is infused with McCullers's signature themes of loneliness in marriage and the emotional vicissitudes of life in the South.