<p>Southern Light tells the story of Dr. Carl Ransome, a lonely and disillusioned man who, in retirement, has found a haven on a small island in Chesapeake Bay. Here he encounters the tormented sightless woman Sylvie, and together they are drawn into a web of confession and self-disclosure. Ransome's story, as it pours from him after a lifetime of suppression, reveals a man whose marriage, whose fatherhood, whose lifelong service to the poor and ill have all been traduced and meaningless; a man whose ultimate moral abdication has involved the death of a child. Sylvie's confessions in turn, disclose an echoing pattern of family tragedy, climaxed by her sense of moral complicity in the death of her lover.<br>As these two reminiscences unfold and intertwine, we meet those men and women who have played a central role in Carl's and Sylvie's tragedies. Molly, Carl's wife of thirty-five years, whose love for Carl began in a spark of pain and need, before subsiding into years of routine robbed of all meaning; Ron, Sylvie's too-devoted lover, and Nils, the man who stirs in her frightening depths of passion and submission; and, perhaps most crucial of all, Carl's patient Walter Lubby---a black man dying of syphilis, whose dignity and terrible faith invoke the most compelling and mysterious relationship of the doctors life. <br></p>