Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Crime & mystery fiction
Weblink
https://twitter.com/DavidJoy_Aut …

THOSE WE THOUGHT WE KNEW

David Joy

From award-winning writer David Joy comes a searing new novel about the cracks that form in a small North Carolina community and the evils that unfurl from its center.

Toya Gardner, a young Black artist from Atlanta, has returned to her ancestral home in the North Carolina mountains to trace her family history and complete her graduate thesis. But when she encounters a still-standing Confederate monument in the heart of town, she sets her sights on something bigger.

Meanwhile, local deputies find a man sleeping in the back of a station wagon and believe him to be nothing more than some slack-jawed drifter. Yet a search of the man's vehicle reveals that he is a high-ranking member of the Ku Klux Klan, and the uncovering of a notebook filled with local names threatens to turn the mountain on end.

After two horrific crimes split the county apart, every soul must wrestle with deep and unspoken secrets that stretch back for generations. THOSE WE THOUGHT WE KNEW is an urgent unraveling of the dark underbelly of a community. Richly drawn and bracingly honest, it asks what happens when the people you've always known turn out to be monsters? What do you do when everything you ever believed crumbles away?

David Joy is the author of When These Mountains Burn (winner of the 2020 Dashiell Hammett Award), The Line That Held Us (winner of the 2018 SIBA Book Prize), The Weight of This World, and Where All Light Tends to Go (Edgar finalist for Best First Novel). He lives in Tuckasegee, North Carolina.

Available products
Book Published 2023-08-01 by Putnam
Book Published 2023-08-01 by Putnam

Comments

A refreshing departure... Joy has a knack for heightening intrigue... He's like a magician playing a shell game, and it's an effective way to keep readers on their toes. The book is filled with gorgeous prose, particularly when Joy turns his considerable talents toward descriptions of the natural world.

Those We Thought We Knew is a screaming wound bleeding fiery poetry. This is a brilliant novel about racism, generational trauma, reckoning with the past, and the way awfulness tends to hide in the places you least expect it. A heartfelt, brutally honest portrait of the heart and roots of the North Carolina mountains that echoes the entire country. Powerful. Timely. Necessary. Read it.

UK + C: Welbeck ; French: Sonatine ; Italian: Jiminez Edizioni

In every line of this outstanding novel, you feel David Joy's deep connection to the mountains he comes from and the people who live there. With his faultless ear for dialogue and exceptional sense of place, he has crafted a beautiful literary crime thriller about belonging and betrayal in rural America.

[A] searing stunner of a book... It's like a Nina Simone song that contains 'an infinite sort of sadness,' yet closes with a promise of hope.

THOSE WE THOUGHT WE KNEW is a dark cyclone in search of truth. Spinning the gritty complexities and colors of human nature with beautiful, immersive descriptions of the land, Joy writes both holiness and irreverence with the same weight and care. A writer to be trusted, he is one of our best.

Joy [gets] the reader invested in his characters and conveys a clear sense of small-town life.

Unflinching and timely... Joy has mastered the high-stakes, page-turning Appalachian-noir style, and through this lens, the preconceived notions of life in the mountains are overturned.

Those We Thought We Knew is a dark cyclone in search of truth. Spinning the gritty complexities and colors of human nature with beautiful, immersive descriptions of the land, Joy writes both holiness and irreverence with the same weight and care. A writer to be trusted, he is one of our best.

[David Joy] is a man who sees his homeplace clearly and who writes like his hand was touched by God.

[A] powerful novel that pushes beyond Joy's rural noir to confront timely issues.

[A] salient novel... Through rich character introspection and acidic dialogue, Joy masterfully encapsulates the larger conversation about America's hidden past occurring in the real world in real time.

Joy weaves the stories together and comes out the other side with a richly-layered vision of a small town living through the broader crises of a divided nation increasingly enamored with violence.

THOSE WE THOUGHT WE KNEW is a CrimeReads's Most Anticipated Crime Fiction of Summer 2023 BookRiot's Most Anticipated Releases for the Second Half of 2023

In this episode we discuss David's new novel THOSE WE THOUGHT WE KNEW, social themes of; racism, white privilege and being proud of one's heritage and the impact that is having not only in Appalachian communities but the United States as a whole, crafting an opening line that grabs the reader, the importance of sense of place and already having that place in mind (specifically Jackson County, NC) before putting pen to page, having and using the feedback from an authenticity reader, the relocation of the Cullowhee African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in 1929 and how that real life event became a pivotal moment for character Toya Gardner, and much more! Read more...

Those We Thought We Knew is a beautifully fearless contemplation. The best novels ask the hard questions and task us to come up with answers. Joy is asking the hardest question and daring us to answer truthfully.

The mystery at the novel's heart plays out in an unexpected way, with Joy employing a deft touch to the plotting... An emotionally complex procedural that goes to unexpected places.

In Those We Thought We Knew, community is a double-edged sword: a source of comfort, memory, and belonging, but also treacherous terrain where the roots of intolerance and old ways of thinking run deep. Joy takes us into the hearts and minds of characters of all stripes - bad actors and do-gooders, cynics and true-believers - in this revealing portrait of modern America. Not many writers could write so unflinchingly or so honestly. Those We Thought We Knew is a book for our time: poignant, fearless, and best of all, true.