Rivers, Michael Farris Smith
Rivers, Michael Farris Smith
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Rivers

Author: Michael Farris Smith

Narrator: Michael Farris Smith

Unabridged: 11 hr 29 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/10/2013


Synopsis

For fans of Cormac McCarthy and Annie Proulx, “a wonderfully cinematic story” (The Washington Post) set in the post-Katrina South after violent storms have decimated the region.

It had been raining for weeks. Maybe months. He had forgotten the last day that it hadn’t rained, when the storms gave way to the pale blue of the Gulf sky, when the birds flew and the clouds were white and sunshine glistened across the drenched land.

The Gulf Coast has been brought to its knees. Years of catastrophic hurricanes have so punished and depleted the region that the government has drawn a new boundary ninety miles north of the coastline. Life below the Line offers no services, no electricity, and no resources, and those who stay behind live by their own rules—including Cohen, whose wife and unborn child were killed during an evacuation attempt. He buried them on family land and never left.

But after he is ambushed and his home is ransacked, Cohen is forced to flee. On the road north, he is captured by Aggie, a fanatical, snake-handling preacher who has a colony of captives and dangerous visions of repopulating the barren region. Now Cohen is faced with a decision: continue to the Line alone, or try to shepherd the madman’s prisoners across the unforgiving land with the biggest hurricane yet bearing down—and Cohen harboring a secret that poses the greatest threat of all.

Eerily prophetic in its depiction of a Southern landscape ravaged by extreme weather, Rivers is a masterful tale of survival and redemption in a world where the next devastating storm is never far behind.“This is the kind of book that lifts you up with its mesmerizing language then pulls you under like a riptide” (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution).

About Michael Farris Smith

Michael Farris Smith has been awarded the Transatlantic Review Award, Brick Streets Press Short Story Award, Mississippi Arts Commission Literary Arts Fellowship, and the Alabama Arts Council Fellowship Award for Literature. He is a graduate of Mississippi State and the Center for Writers at Southern Miss. He lives in Columbus, Mississippi, with his wife and two daughters. Rivers is his first novel.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Susanne

Brilliant, Descriptive, Devastating & Haunting. Cohen is a man who has lost almost everything and who is desperately trying to hold on to the only thing he has left. His home. Yet the weather has other ideas. The torrential rains come down day after day after day. Sunshine is something seen rarely......more

Goodreads review by Karen

This was the first novel by Michael Farris Smith, and I love this man's writing! I felt like I was right in the middle of the Gulf Coast, where the rain and storms never stopped, causing the government to draw a line where people who live below the line get no help, it's a no man's land, people who......more