Vendor
	Liepman Literary Agency Marc Koralnik
Original language
English

WHERE THE DEAD SIT TALKING

Brandon Hobson

Set in rural Oklahoma during the late 1980s, Where the Dead Sit Talking is a startling, authentically voiced and lyrically written Native American coming-of-age story.

With his single mother in jail, Sequoyah, a fifteen-year-old Cherokee boy, is placed in foster care with the Troutt family. Literally and figuratively scarred by his mother's years of substance abuse, Sequoyah keeps mostly to himself, living with his emotions pressed deep below the surface. At least until he meets seventeen-year-old Rosemary, another youth staying with the Troutts. Sequoyah and Rosemary bond over their shared Native American background and tumultuous paths through the foster care system, but as Sequoyah's feelings toward Rosemary deepen, the precariousness of their lives and the scars of their pasts threaten to undo them both.

Brandon Hobson is the author of four books including WHERE THE DEAD SIT TALKING. He has won a Pushcart Prize, and his stories and essays have appeared in Conjunctions, The Believer, The Paris Review Daily, NOON, and elsewhere. He is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation Tribe of Oklahoma.

Available products
Book Published 2018-02-01 by Soho

Comments

"The latest from Hobson is a smart, dark novel of adolescence, death, and rural secrets set in late- 1980s Oklahoma. Hobson's narrative control is stunning, carrying the reader through scenes and timelines with verbal grace and sparse detail. Far more than a mere coming-of-age story, this is a remarkable and moving novel."

"[A] poignant and disturbing coming-of-age story . . . Hobson presents a painfully visceral drama about the overlooked lives of those struggling on the periphery of mainstream society."

A man looks back on 1989, the year he was 15, when he was living in a foster home and a girl who was also living there died in front of him. That's no spoiler: Sequoyah tells us about Rosemary's death within three sentences of the start of his tale. I have been unhappy for many years now, he begins, then tells the story of how his mother went to jail on a drug charge and, after a stint at a shelter, he wound up living with the Troutts, Harold and Agnes, and their two other foster kids, the eccentric George, 13, who was prone to sleepwalking, and 17-year-old Rosemary, who shared Sequoyah's Native American heritage and liked to talk about death. They lived in rural Oklahoma, and the quiet suited them all; the Troutts were kind people, and everyone in the house liked to be by themselves a lot, with Agnes going for drives, Harold napping in the basement where he surprisingly ran an illegal bookie shop, George lying on his bed meditating, and Rosemary heading to the woods with a drawing pad. Sequoyah used to get in trouble at the shelter for slipping out at night to take walks, so he fit right into this house full of secrets and relative freedom. Hobson (Desolation of Avenues Untold, 2015, etc.) writes in a spare, even tone, and no matter what Sequoyah sayseven when it's about feeling dead inside, or about wanting to hurt someonethe reader is with him, empathizing. As in a Shirley Jackson story, everything seems perfectly ordinary until it doesn't. Why did the entire town seem to have the same strange habits? Sequoyah wonders. Hobson is in masterly control of his material, letting Sequoyah relax into the welcoming Troutt family home while glimpsing the menace behind the curtain. Or is the menace just inside him? A masterly tale of life and death, hopes and fears, secrets and lies.

Finalist National Book Award Read more...

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