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Book Title

Scribe

Subtitle
A Novel
Author 1
Alyson Hagy
Body
A brutal civil war has ravaged the country, and contagious fevers have decimated the population. Abandoned farmhouses litter the isolated mountain valleys and shady hollows. The economy has been reduced to barter and trade.  
 
In this craggy, unwelcoming world, the central character of Scribe ekes out a lonely living on the family farmstead where she was raised and where her sister met an untimely end. She lets a migrant group known as the Uninvited set up temporary camps on her land, and maintains an uneasy peace with her cagey neighbors and local enforcer Billy Kingery. She has learned how to make papers and inks, and she has become known for her letter-writing skills, which she exchanges for tobacco, firewood, and other scarce resources. An unusual request for a letter from a man with hidden motivations unleashes the ghosts of her troubled past and sets off a series of increasingly calamitous events that culminate in a harrowing journey to a crossroads.
 
Drawing on traditional folktales and the history and culture of Appalachia, Alyson Hagy has crafted a gripping, swiftly plotted novel that touches on pressing issues of our time—migration, pandemic disease, the rise of authoritarianism—and makes a compelling case for the power of stories to both show us the world and transform it.
 

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List Price
$16.00
ISBN
ISBN
978-1-55597-818-1
Format
Format
Paperback
Publication Date
Publication Date
Subject
Subject
Pages
Pages
176
Trim Size
Trim Size
5.5 x 8.25
Keynote
A haunting, evocative tale about the power of storytelling

About the Author

Alyson  Hagy
Credit: Ted Brummond
Alyson Hagy was raised on a farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. She is the author of eight works of fiction, most recently Scribe. She lives in Laramie, Wyoming.

http://www.alysonhagy.com
More by author

Praise

  • “It’s a hungry book—one where every sentence seems to imply a second that it never offers; where every page and every paragraph offers the ghost of a feast, but never lets you eat.”—NPR.org
  • “In prose that is ornate and spare by turns, Hagy explores the meagre possibilities of individual redemption in a society traumatized by unspeakable violence.”The New Yorker
  • “Fans of Fiona Mozley’s Elmet will revel in this genre-busting feminist folktale of a novel, which is as rooted in its own particular, peculiar time as it is relevant to the concerns of 2018.”Vanity Fair
  • “[An] eerie, artfully etched post-apocalyptic tale.”BBC Culture
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