Falling to Earth by Kate Southwood
Europa Editions • $16 • ISBN 9781609450915
on sale March 2013
The debut novel from Kate Southwood is set in the 1920s Midwest, and opens just as a devastating tornado strikes a small town. As the residents of Marah, Illinois, sort through the wreckage, it becomes clear that only one family has escaped the storm’s wrath. But the resulting hostility and anger focused on Paul Graves and his wife and children by their suffering neighbors may have even fiercer consequences.
Southwood’s prose is vibrant and clear, and Falling to Earth‘s thrilling opening immediately draws in the reader with its brutal depiction of the power of nature.
Running the length of his own mutilated street, Paul tries to look straight ahead at what he’s running toward. He can’t make any sense of the nightmare vision, but neither can he look away. The cloud has been capricious: the houses on one side of the street have been knocked into piles of sticks, the bricks blown out of the sidewalks and trees snatched out of the ground like hanks of hair. On the other side, the houses are still standing, some shoved over sideways or twisted. Their roofs are mostly gone and the first fires have been touched off by the snapped electrical lines and cookstoves lying in the wreckage. A few of the people he passes walk naked, crazed, calling out names. An arm rests in the crotch of a tree. Paul tries again to shut out the grotesques, running toward home, running through the searing of his lungs, desperately afraid of arriving.
What are you reading this week?
This sounds like a good read. Thanks for posting a review.
Ann
I am looking forward to reading this book…
A new memoir titled”Her”
Ooh, our nonfiction editor is looking at that now, and it sounds very juicy.