Out of Peel Tree

Moving through time and space, "Out of Peel Tree"unfolds the patterns of an Appalachian sensibility that reverberate everywhere: a fatalism balanced by humor and flinty, hard-won hope, an appreciation for the surprises of the everyday, and a search for love and home amid strange and familiar places and people. This innovative debut novel reveals the lives of a far-flung contemporary Appalachian family through a web of delicate turning points. A child discovers a grandmother she never knew has died. A runaway teen schemes to start a new life in Texas.A man on parole falls hopelessly in love with a shoplifter. A woman receives a letter about her husband s other wife. An old woman confronts a burglar with the help of her ghost-husband. United by a connection to their matriarch, these characters search at home and beyond to make a fresh sense of their changing lives. As a novel in stories, "Out of Peel Tree"brings a new lyricism to the page and a new voice to American and Appalachian literaturea voice deeply inflected by the beauty of the natural world and by working-class grit.

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