A Land More Kind Than Home - Tapa blanda

This book will knock your socks off. It's so good to read a first novel that sings with talent. Wiley Cash has a beautifully written hit on his hands. (Clyde Edgerton)

The first thing that struck me about Wiley's novel is the beautiful prose: the narrative is strong, clean, direct and economical. He is very familiar with this part of rural North Carolina, its mountains, valleys, rivers, vegetation and farms. He knows the people their customs: work habit, religion, their everyday lives. Wiley Cash is a talented and disciplined young writer, and his first novel proves it. I think this could be the beginning of a long, fruitful career. (Ernest J. Gaines, author of A Lesson Before Dying)

Whew! Wiley Cash is the real deal and his first novel is an atmospheric crossroads filled with characters who long for better, but know that their best will never be good enough, is dense with stories intersecting like the branches in a laurel hell. (Nancy Peacock, author of Life Without Water)

A mesmerizing literary thriller about the bond between two brothers and the evil they face in a small North Carolina town, a stunning debut reminiscent of John Hart and Tom Franklin.

Deep in the heart of the rural South lies a small town as quiet and unassuming as any other. But it's a place that accepts its secrets and believes that that's the way things always have been--and always will be. Jess Hall, an adventurous, precocious boy, has grown up there and feels enormously protective of his older sibling, whom everyone calls Stump , an autistic child who has never uttered a word in his life. One day the boys climb up on the rickety rain barrel beside their house-- a stunt their mother has told them time and time again not to do--and spy something in the window that they shouldn't. Stump is taken away and the boys are separated--and catastrophe strikes, shattering the world as they know it. If Jess has suspected that there is much about the world of adults he doesn't understand, he now knows that that knowledge is also much more dangerous and close to him than ever before.

Told in three resonant and evocative voices--the boy Jess; midwife Adelaide Lyle, the moral conscience of the town; and Clem Barefield, a sheriff with his own painful past as a father of a son--this is a haunting tale of courage in the face of cruelty and the power of love that spans generations.