Summer in Madison County. Seventeen-year-old Travis Shelton cannot see a way out of his small town—until he discovers a grove of marijuana in the woods that could make him some serious money.
But Travis has stumbled across more than drugs. His discovery is the first unwitting step in a journey back to the savage violence and betrayal festering in the community’s past, and to the corruption in its present.
Vivid and unsettling, The World Made Straight is a powerful exploration of the secrets that bind us together and drive us apart.
andThe World Made Straight
‘An intellectually satisfying work of suspense … [The World Made Straight] reminds us of the sort of compelling literature a brave artist can fashion from the shards of such experience.’
[Ron Rash’s] novels are complex and compelling, told in graceful, conscientious prose, and The World Made Straight is his finest yet.‘
‘Ron Rash writes some of the most memorable novels of this young century … No writer since the late Larry Brown has handled the raw grit of country people as truthfully as Rash… . At once uplifting, harrowing, and unforgettable.’
‘[The World Made Straight] is the third novel by Ron Rash that has brought my life to a grinding halt—but to praise Rash simply as a powerful storyteller would be to overlook his gifts as a profoundly ethical writer and, at the same time, a poet with a fine and tender eye for the beauty of nature. What I love and admire most of all about this book, however, is its fierce confrontation of a human dilemma that has sparked too many of the world’s most violent tragedies: the burning question of just how much allegiance we owe family and community, including the ghosts from our past.’
‘The World Made Straight is a wonderful, heartbreaking, heart-healing kind of work, a work of genius—genius and insight and poetry and the kind of language that whispers to me like music coming back off dense wet hills and upturned faces.’
‘The Cove is a marvelous novel, bristling with power, humanity and the exceptional quality of characterization and story-telling we have come to expect from Ron Rash’
‘Set during World War I, The Cove is a novel that speaks intimately to today’s politics. Beautifully written, tough, raw, uncompromising, entirely new. Ron Rash is a writer’s writer who writes for others’
‘Rash writes in the tradition of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor and more contemporary writers such as Charles Frazier and Cormac McCarthy. His fiction occupies that strange, language-driven netherland between myth and realism. It’s a dark, poetic, blood-soaked world.’
‘‘Ron Rash’s Burning Bright is a volume of spare, finely tuned short stories that take us deep into the soul of the American highlands…this volume of stories consolidates Rash’s reputation as an American master at the height of his powers.’
‘Powerful, violent and compelling, Serena has the grace of a literary masterpiece, a read to be savoured page after page. The language is cool, clear and compelling; dialogue and atmospherics as sharp as the Appalachian mountain air.’
‘Get as far as the opening page of Ron Rash’s Serena and you won’t be able to put it down…His writing is beautifully evocative and his sense of place and time captivating…utterly chilling and gripping reading. Ron Rash has a bestseller on his hands.’
‘Rash’s stories are firmly located in time and place but have a universalism that transcends both.’
‘Woven through the narrative, bloody strands of violence run down through the generations from the Shelton Laurel massacre of 1863 to the savage battle fought by the small-town drug lords of today.’
