From Grammy Award-winning musician and author Charlie Peacock comes a wise, witty, and intricately layered debut novel about unexpected friendships, enduring love, and a family's reckoning with its secrets. Each revelation moves the story toward its defining question: Can love survive the crucible of the whole, unguarded truth?
Praised by Variety for his "absorbing and exquisitely written" prose, Peacock brings to literary fiction an intimate understanding of the nervous system under stress and the managed silences that shape a family. The novel traces how deep love and loyalty can coexist with concealment, violence, and truths too strange to invent.
Moving between the affluent Bay Area, Sacramento, and agrarian Tennessee, the novel follows the Taylor family as they navigate relationships across culture, vocation, and faith. At its center are two generations shaped by trauma and secrets: a mother whose buried past and inflexible religiosity tore the family apart, and her oldest son Augie, whose success is as much a product of his pain as his giftedness. Circling them is a culturally diverse ensemble cast, from a farm-to-table food expert to a jazz-drumming psychedelics scholar.
When Michael, the youngest Taylor sibling, suffers a violent, unprovoked attack, the family rallies around him. But it also causes a buried past to surface.
After an incident with his girlfriend Marie, Augie confronts the return of physical symptoms rooted in an unspeakable secret. Though he loves Marie deeply, he cannot bring himself to reveal what is hidden. Ironically, for Augie, the life everyone mistakes for thriving is perfect for hiding.
A controversial work assignment with millions at stake sends Augie and Marie to Tennessee. His mission: seek counsel from writer and sage J. Tapley Dial at Sugar Creek Farm. There, among new friends, they glimpse a "soil and soul" life and find the wisdom and courage for what lies ahead.
Blending mystery and psychological suspense with an intricately layered family saga, Once Concealed Now Revealed explores a love story under unspeakable pressure, how deeply held beliefs can wound those we love most, and what it costs us when success comes at the expense of people and planet.
Threaded throughout the drama is the quieter power of wisdom, place, presence, hospitality, useful work, and lives at peace in their own skin. The contrast sets the stage for change but offers no guarantee of it. Even if the unspeakables are safely spoken, are some wounded hearts incapable of moving toward reconciliation, healing, and new life? Is anyone or anything just too broken? Is the crucible of truth one more crisis and not a cure?