A Painted House

A Painted House is a novel by the American writer John Grisham, published in 2001. It was inspired by his own childhood in Arkansas and was his first substantial book outside the legal thrillers he had become known for; it appeared first in six instalments in a magazine in 2000.

Luke Chandler is seven years old and the youngest member of a family of cotton farmers who are working against a deadline they cannot move. His grandfather, whom he calls Pappy, takes him to look for workers, and the family hires the Spruills, a large group from the hills who arrive with their own quarrels and secrets, and a few Mexican labourers who come back every season. The book is told entirely from Luke's point of view, which means the reader is given the summer as a child experiences it: the work in the fields, the heat, the radio, the small town's opinions, and the adults' troubles understood only partly and out of order. Luke has been told to say nothing about some of what he sees, and the novel is built on the gap between what he has understood and what he has been able to tell anybody.

Grisham grew up in the Arkansas Delta and used the place and the period to write a book about a family's year rather than a crime, and the house of the title is one that gets painted only if the harvest is good.