In Michael Farris Smith's latest "riveting" epic, a young woman
returns home with her child to her ghost-haunted father, while a
religious extremist hunts the stormridden territory to find the girl who
may be the region's savior. (Laird Hunt, National Book Award-nominated
author of Zorrie and Neverhome)
There was no rising from the dead and there was no hand to calm the
storms and there was no peace in no valley.
In the hurricane-ravaged bottomlands of South Mississippi, where stores
are closing and jobs are few, a fierce zealot has gained a foothold,
capitalizing on the vulnerability of a dwindling population and a
burning need for hope. As she preaches and promises salvation from the
light of the pulpit, in the shadows she sows the seeds of violence.
Elsewhere, Jessie and her toddler, Jace, are on the run across the
Mississippi/Louisiana line, in a resentful return to her childhood home
and her desolate father. Holt, Jace's father, is missing and hunted by a
brutish crowd, and an old man witnesses the wrong thing in the depths of
night. In only a matter of days, all of their lives will collide, and be
altered, in the maelstrom of the changing world.
At once elegiac and profound, Salvage This World journeys into the
heart of a region growing darker and less forgiving, and asks how we
keep going--what do we hold onto--in a land where God has fled.
