Swallow Savannah A Novel

Ken Burger, columnist for The Post and Courier in Charleston, S.C., grew up in Allendale, S.C., near the Savannah River Site.

“It’s downwind and downstream from what we called ‘the bomb plant’ growing up,” Burger says. “It was a big top-secret place everybody buzzed about.”

Now Allendale of the ’50s and ’60s is the setting of Burger’s novel “Swallow Savannah,” about political corruption, segregation and man’s inhumanity to man, all posed against the backdrop of the Cold War and the civil rights movement.

The plant had more than 30,000 workers at its peak, which made it a microcosm for the South. Blacks and whites lived in what Burger calls “parallel universes.” more...

For a first novel, "Swallow Savannah" has several pluses: It's not overly long, some passages are very well-written, and the Southern setting breathes life into the characters.It has some minuses, too: Overly detailed descriptions of some characters, some unintentionally funny dialogue, and a sudden switch to gratuitous violence at the end. more...

Last week I had lunch with Ken Burger. Big deal, right?! You’re darn tooting it’s a big deal! From 1988 until 2008, Ken was the Executive Sports Editor and wrote an award-winning sports column for The Post and Courier. He was hailed as one of the country’s best sports columnists by the Associated Press three times. Ken has also won numerous writing awards in South Carolina and was honored as South Carolina Journalist of the Year in 1996. He now writes a metro column for the Post and Courier, and he published his first novel, Swallow Savannah, in 2008. So I repeat, “Last week I had lunch with Ken Burger.” Okay, okay, now I feel the “Oooos” and “Ahhhs”! more...

Ken Burger of Charleston, author of "Swallow Savannah," autographed copies of his debut novel Saturday morning. Attendance for the book signing was brisk, with fans of the novel fictionalizing the impact of the construction of "the Bomb Plant" on the local landscape coming in to meet Burger, according to Meg Ferguson of The Book Stall.

"We had a sensational book signing," Ferguson said. "Ken was engaging, entertaining and quite personable. We had a large turnout and we anticipate his book doing quite well here." more...

"Swallow Savannah" tells a tale filled with nuclear testing, political corruption, psychological turmoil, civil rights, explosions, murder, football, intrigue, manipulation, exploitation and family secrets.

The new novel by Ken Burger, nationally acclaimed sports column writer for The Post and Courier in Charleston, takes a fictional look at the Old South during the transformational years of the Savannah River Plant and its impact on neighboring communities. more...

A sense of place is an essential element in the greatness of the Southern novel, indeed of Southern literature in all of its forms. Sometimes the place itself is the most fully realized character in the story, and so it is with Ken Burger’s first novel. He evokes the landscapes of what dons the thin disguise of “Bluff County” with love and occasional lyricism, especially the inescapable presence of the great river that forms one of the county’s borders. The first character we encounter, the mysterious black man William, is the one most completely at home in the landscape with which he identifies so totally that he can merge into “the fallen cypress, blackgum and willow oaks that formed the forbidding swamp which was his home.” The very first sentence, informing us that his is an “existence all but invisible to white people,” signals that this will be, as almost all Southern literature inevitably is, in part a study of relations between the two races. more...

Charleston readers know him as a former sports columnist for The Post and Courier. He's now the newspaper's metro columnist, but recently Ken Burger, often cited among the best writers in the country, has ventured into the world of fiction.

His new novel, "Swallow Savannah", is set at the Savannah River Site. It becomes a catalyst for racial tensions and political intrigue in a small fictional town in rural South Carolina that's not all that dissimiliar to Allendale, where he grew up. more...

Corralled so long by the constraints of a column, Ken Burger's debut novel would travel wide-open narrative spaces. After decades of daily deadlines, this one would breathe

"Swallow Savannah" may be confined to a "Southern crossroads caught in the undertow of time," but for Burger, a longtime sports writer for The Post and Courier, it meant total control at the reins, and all the hours he needed to bring it home. more...