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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Maren Wiederhold
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HOLDING ON TO NOTHING

Elizabeth Chiles Shelbourne

Lucy Kilgore has her bags packed for her escape from her rural Tennessee upbringing, but a drunken mistake forever tethers her to the town and one of its least-admired residents, Jeptha Taylor, who becomes the father of her child.

Together, these two young people work to form a family, though neither has any idea how to accomplish that, and the odds are against them in a place with little to offer other than bluegrass music, tobacco fields, and a Walmart full of beer and firearms for the hunting season. Their path is harrowing, but Lucy and Jeptha are characters to love, and readers will root for their success in a novel so riveting that no one will want to turn out the light until they know whether this family will survive. Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne grew up reading, writing, and shooting in East Tennessee. After graduating from Amherst College, she became a writer and a staff editor at the Atlantic Monthly. Her nonfiction work has been published in the Atlantic Monthly, Boston Globe, and Globalpost, among others. She worked on this novel in Grub Street's year-long Novel Incubator course, under Michelle Hoover and Lisa Borders. Her essay on how killing a deer made her a feminist was published in Click! When We Knew We Were Feminists (http: //bit.ly/2uOKXgB), edited by Courtney E. Martin and J. Courtney Sullivan. She lives outside Boston with her husband and four children.

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Book Published 2019-10-22 by Blair

Comments

Shelburne writes with an unprecedented lyricism that is both highly literary and charmingly accessible. From the opening moments of this page-turner, the reader can't help but surrender to the titanic love affair that is Jeptha and Lucy. The storytelling is masterful and enchanting.

A novel of big skies and limited choices, of sweet bluegrass in a sticky hometown bar, of tobacco and guns, danger and desire. Shelburne shoots straight, never allows us to turn our heads. And even non-praying folk will pray for the desperate mismatch of Lucy and Jeptha and their lonely, shivering hearts.

Following in the literary footsteps of Silas House's debut novel Clay's Quilt, this is a tragically beautiful tale of love, loss, music, and blue-collar mountain life.

With unflinching candor imbued with love and understanding, Shelburne's evocative debut novel explores the meaning of family and the choices people make when the world denies them good options. A compassionate but unsentimental tale of love, loss, and hardship in modern-day Appalachia.

A resonant song of the South, all whiskey, bluegrass, Dolly Parton, tobacco fields, and women who know better but still fall for the lowdown men whom they know will disappoint them.

Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne's debut novel sings and burns in equal measure. A a gripping story of love and place, of the small choices and large passions that determine our lives, of the gorgeous hope that tomorrow will bring something solid and sturdy, something lucky and true.

Shelburne's stunning debut novel is a long trip into small-town Tennessee... riveting, touching, heart-wrenching, tragic, and beautiful.

Shelburne writes with a chafe and charm that makes you give a damn about these flawed characters, Lucy and Jeptha, makes you root for them when what little they have is at risk. This novel has all the makings of a true ballad - heartache and dead ends, booze and bad decisions, double-crossing relatives, a hand-me-down mandolin, and a loyal dog named Crystal Gayle.

A smart, wry novel filled with bourbon, bluegrass, grit, and heart.

Shelburne deftly captures the blue-collar ache and darkly comic sensibility of what it means to exist in a world of disappointment and generational trauma, where one is both cussed and cursed. It's impossible to turn away as these hardscrabble characters embark on a long shot at love despite voices real and imagined that shout in dissent. A stunning debut by a fierce new voice in southern fiction.

Shelbourne refuses to give the reader a simple, and stereotypical, tale of Appalachian dysfunction. Instead, we get a story of a seemingly star-crossed couple striving to create a better life in the most trying of circumstances. A gem.

Shelburne's complex, moving portrait of Jeptha - universally dismissed as a loser in his small town in Tennessee, but who, in Shelburne's hands, is a wounded, sensitive soul who was never taught how to be the good man he longs to be - resonates long after the final chapter... marks the debut of an important new author of Southern fiction.

Forget Hillbilly Elegy and read this gorgeous novel instead. Every detail is exactly right. Contemporary themes of work and no work, drinking, sex, guns, music, community, and no future - along with in-depth character development and a hard-driving plot - make this a book you literally cannot put down.