February 2017 First Editions Club Pick

New York, NY: Lee Boudreaux Books (pub: February 7, 2017)

First Edition. Signed.

Fine in dust jacket.

"A novel that lends dignity and grace to those too often damned, Desperation Road is fearless, guttural, and thunderously heartfelt. Quite simply one of our finest writers at work today, Michael Farris Smith has made his own place at the table. One of the most beautiful books I've ever read."

-David Joy (Author of The Weight of This World (forthcoming March 2017) and Where All Light Tends to Go)

In the vein of Daniel Woodrell's Winter's Bone and the works of Ron Rash, a novel set in a tough-and-tumble Mississippi town where drugs, whiskey, guns, and the desire for revenge violently intersect

For eleven years the clock has been ticking for Russell Gaines as he sits in Parchman Penitentiary in the Mississippi Delta. His sentence is now up, and he believes his debt has been paid. But when he returns home, he soon discovers that revenge lives and breathes all around him.

On the same day that Russell is released from prison, a woman named Maben and her young daughter trudge along the side of the interstate under the punishing summer sun. Desperate and exhausted, the pair spend their last dollar on a room for the night, a night that ends with Maben running through the darkness holding a pistol, and a dead deputy sprawled in the middle o the road in the glow of his own headlights.

With the dawn, destinies collide, and Russell is forced to decide whose life he will save--his own or those of the woman and child.

Delivered in powerful and lyrical prose, Desperation Road is a story of troubled souls twisted with regret and bound by secrets that stretch over the years and across the land.