Salvage this World

<p><b>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 <i>Zorrie</i> and <i>Neverhome</i>)</b></p> <i>There was no rising from the dead and there was no hand to calm the storms and there was no peace in no valley.</i><br> <br> <br> <br> 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.<br> <br> <br> <br> 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.<br> <br> <br> <br> At once elegiac and profound, <i>Salvage This World</i> 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.<br> <br> <b>Garden & Gun Top Reads of 2023 </b>* <b>Bibliolifestyle Best Literary Fiction of 2023 </b>*<b> Southern Living Southern Writers to Read Right Now</b>