Blackwood

A TIMES AND SUNDAY TIMES NOVEL OF THE YEAR

From the author of Desperation Road, longlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger

The small town of Red Bluff, Mississippi, has seen better days, but now seems stuck in a black-and-white photograph from days gone by. Unknowing, the town and its people are about to come alive again, awakening to nightmares, as ghostly whispers have begun to fill the night from the kudzu-covered valley that sits on the edge of town.

When a vagabond family appears on the outskirts, when twin boys and a woman go missing, disappearing beneath the vines, a man with his own twisted past struggles to untangle the secrets in the midst of the town trauma.

This is a landscape of fear and ghosts, of regret and violence. It is a landscape transformed by the kudzu vines that have enveloped the hills around it, swallowing homes, cars, rivers, and hiding terrible secrets deeper still. Blackwood is the evil in the woods, the wickedness that lurks in all of us.

Praise for Blackwood and Michael Farris Smith

'If you're a fan of Southern or Rural Noir – James Lee Burke, Daniel Woodrell, Donald Ray Pollock, the literary children of Flannery O'Connor – you'll feel uncomfortably at home […] Though Farris Smith has five novels under his belt, he is little known in Britain. That ought to change: let some Mississippian mayhem, murder and misery into your lives' – The Times

'Smith is emerging as one of the great chroniclers of America's dispossessed. A haunting and utterly compelling read' – Mail on Sunday

'You will not be disappointed' – Daily Mail