Your first incredibly memorable read of the year releases today and introduces readers to the talent of Mesha Maren, whose Sugar Run had me literally dreaming in this tense, dusty, green, and wild Appalachian scenery as I read. It’s a novel about building a new life while unsure how to escape the old one, about rehabilitation real and imagined, about home and family and love and jealousy, about crimes of passion and crimes of necessity, and, yes, about being a queer woman through it all.
In 1989, Jodi McCarty is seventeen years old when she’s sentenced to life in prison for manslaughter. She’s released eighteen years later and finds herself at a Greyhound bus stop, reeling from the shock of unexpected freedom. Not yet able to return to her lost home in the Appalachian mountains, she goes searching for someone she left behind, but on the way, she meets and falls in love with Miranda, a troubled young mother. Together, they try to make a fresh start, but is that even possible in a town that refuses to change? Set within the charged insularity of rural West Virginia, Sugar Run is a searing and gritty debut about making a run for another life.