Patrick Millikin recently welcomed Michael Farris Smith to The Poisoned Pen for a virtual event. Smith’s latest epic is Salvage This World. There are signed copies of it available through the Webstore. https://tinyurl.com/2sjudff9
Here’s the summary of Salvage This World.
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 Zorrie and Neverhome)There was no rising from the dead and there was no hand to calm the storms and there was no peace in no valley.
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.
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.
At once elegiac and profound, Salvage This World 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.
Garden & Gun Top Reads of 2023 • Bibliolifestyle Best Literary Fiction of 2023 • Southern Living Southern Writers to Read Right Now
Michael Farris Smith is an award-winning writer whose novels have appeared on Best of the Year lists with Esquire, NPR, Southern Living, Garden & Gun, Book Riot, and numerous other outlets, and have been named Indie Next, Barnes & Noble Discover, and Amazon Best of the Month selections. He has also written the feature-film adaptations of his novels Desperation Road and The Fighter, titled for the screen as Rumble Through the Dark. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with his wife and daughters.
Enjoy the conversation with Michael Farris Smith.