Retired junior college history professor Andrew Lachlan has returned to his family home on a lake in north central Georgia to spend the last year of his life.

As Andrew's life draws toward its inevitable end, he begins to find the edge of a new transcendence and an understanding of how generations learn and pass on the best of what they know and feel.

In the end, as Andrew prepares to pass from the Earth, he learns the complexity that everyone must face squarely to understand the meaning of a life's time.2 Philip Lee Williams had written two apprentice works before he came to write The Heart of a Distant Forest beginning on May 1, 1980, and finishing it that autumn.

Williams decided to give the novel form one more try and to that end, he made a list of all his then-current passions, and in that late spring of 1980 typed the novel's first line: "Morning is rising in silence."

After two failed attempts to write a novel, Williams found a new focus with The Heart of a Distant Forest, and it launched his career.3 Townsend Prize for Fiction, 1986 Hardcover, W. W. Norton & Co., 1984 Mass-market softcover, Ballantine, 1985 British edition, John Curley & Assoc, 1986 Swedish translation as Djupt I En Fjarren Skog, Raben & Sjogren, 1988; Trade paperback, Peachtree Southern Classics, 1991 Trade paperback, University of Georgia Press, 2005