A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

One of the National Book Foundation's 5 Best Writers Under 35

Finalist for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for a distinguished book of fiction

Third Place in Fiction for the Barnes & Noble Discover Award

Aloma is an orphan, raised by her aunt and uncle, educated at a mission school in the Kentucky mountains. At the start of the novel, she moves to an isolated tobacco farm to be with her lover, a young man named Orren, whose family has died in a car accident, leaving him in charge. The place is rough and quiet; Orren is overworked and withdrawn. Left mostly to her own, Aloma struggles to settle herself in this lonely setting and to find beauty and stimulation where she can. As she decides whether to stay with Orren, she will choose either to fight her way to independence or accept the rigors of commitment.

Both a drama of age-old conflicts and a portrait of modern life, C. E. Morgan's debut novel is "simply astonishing . . . a book about life force, the precious will to live, and all the things that can suck it right out of a person" (Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times).