Synopses & Reviews
One of Entertainment Weekly's Most Anticipated Books of 2019
"A heady admixture of explosive plot and taut, burnished prose . . . Mesha Maren writes like a force of nature." Lauren Groff, author of Florida
In 1989, Jodi McCarty is seventeen years old when she's sentenced to life in prison. When she's released eighteen years later, she finds herself at a Greyhound bus stop, reeling from the shock of unexpected freedom but determined to chart a better course for herself. Not yet able to return to her lost home in the Appalachian Mountains, she heads south in search of someone she left behind, as a way of finally making amends. There, she meets and falls in love with Miranda, a troubled young mother living in a motel room with her children. Together they head toward what they hope will be a fresh start. But what do you do with your past — and with a town and a family that refuses to forget, or to change?
Set within the charged insularity of rural West Virginia, Mesha Maren's Sugar Run is a searing and gritty debut about making a break for another life, the use and treachery of makeshift families, and how, no matter the distance we think we've traveled from the mistakes we've made, too often we find ourselves standing in precisely the place we began.
Review
"Through exquisite prose and beautifully nuanced storytelling, Maren offers a complicated examination of love, identity, the passage of time, and the way small decisions can propel a life forward. . . . undeniably tender." Bustle
Review
"Crisp as mountain air and full of grit and heart, Maren's writing announces a new voice in the Appalachian noir genre." Garden & Gun
Review
"Maren is masterly at describing America's modern wastelands, the blasted towns not yet and maybe never-to-be the beneficiaries of rehabilitation and reoccupation. You can almost see Maren — like Raymond Chandler — cutting each typed page into three strips and requiring each strip to contain something delightful (startling simile, clever dialogue, brilliant description) offered to the reader as a recompense for a world that presses up against you all raw and aggressive and dangerous. A language that fully owns its power to capture just that 'heart-wild magic.'" Charles Frazier, The New York Times Book Review
Review
"Remarkable . . . An accomplished short story writer, Maren makes her debut count with emotionally charged prose and a sense of the yearning we all have for home." BookPage
About the Author
Mesha Maren's short stories and essays have appeared in Tin House, the Oxford American, the Southern Review, TriQuarterly, Ecotone, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, an Elizabeth George Foundation grant, the Kenan Visiting Writer Fellowship at UNC Chapel Hill, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Ucross Foundation. She serves as a National Endowment of the Arts Writing Fellow at the Federal Prison Camp Alderson and is Assistant Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Duke University.