Fairoaks

by Frank Yerby

First published 1957

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3.8(270)

Guy Falks begins with a grievance over family status and turns it into a ruthless campaign for wealth and recognition. His rise carries him from poverty into the plantation aristocracy of the pre-Civil War South, then outward to Europe and to African slave markets as he builds a fortune capable of supporting the identity he intends to claim.
Fairoaks spans much of the era in which Atlantic slavery and plantation wealth shaped elite Southern power. Yerby makes Guy’s success inseparable from systems of coercion and commerce that reach far beyond one estate, while later upheaval tests the durability of the world he has constructed. The broad chronology gives the novel the scale of a saga, but its central question remains personal: what kind of man is produced by a society that rewards acquisition without moral limit?