A deeply emotional memoir of the author's relationship with her drug dealer mother describes her misfit youth and eventual escape into writing before succumbing to addiction and resolving to leave her past in order to survive.

A searing and profound Southern odyssey by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward. In Jesmyn Ward's first novel since her National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. Drawing on Morrison and Faulkner, The Odyssey and the Old Testament, Ward gives us an epochal story, a journey through Mississippi's past and present that is both an intimate portrait...

When fifteen-year-old Lance Covington finds an abandoned baby in the backseat of a car, he knows she's the newborn daughter of a meth addict he's been trying to help. But when police arrest him for kidnapping, Lance is thrust into a criminal world of baby trafficking and drug abuse. His mother, Barbara, looks for help from Kent Harlan—the man whom she secretly, reluctantly loves and who once helped rescue her daughter from a mess of her own.

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Shares the author's upbringing in a family grappling with addiction and how he used art to survive.

When her uncle agrees to pay the tuition at a private boarding school, seventeen-year-old Pearl hopes to escape the homelessness and drama of life with her mother, a former rock star who has ruined her life with drugs.