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WHISKEY & RIBBONS

Leesa Cross (-Smith)

Monday, July 11th. The sky is pink. The Kentucky summer air, humid. Police officer Eamon Royce kisses his wife goodbye in their living room, then kneels and kisses her stomach. Their son is due in less than three weeks. Evi tells Eamon that she loves him. She tells him to be safe.

If anyone had told Evi that morning that just six months later she'd be in that same room, straddling Eamon's best friend and adopted brother on a piano bench as a blizzard roared outside and whiskey roared in their veins—she would have been speechless. She would have shaken her head, laughed, maybe, said that they must be confusing her for Dalton's on-again, off-again lover Frances.

But Evi would have had no way of knowing, that morning, that the key of her life was about to drastically change—and that in the aftermath of the events that would begin to unfold that day, Dalton, suddenly, would become the only part of her life that made sense.

Told from Evi, Dalton, and Eamon's alternating perspectives, WHISKEY & RIBBONS takes us to the beginning, to the day Evi and Eamon first meet. To the smile on Eamon's face when he tells Dalton that this is the woman he is going to marry—and to the fear in his heart when he realizes that marrying Evi, that starting a family with Evi, might mean an end to the only career he's ever known. To Dalton, struggling to make sense of his life next to Eamon's, to his decision to track down the biological father he's never known. And to the reveal of colossal, kaleidoscopic secrets, secrets that shift Evi, Dalton and Eamon's relationships with each other completely.

In the vein of Jojo Moyes' After You, WHISKEY & RIBBONS explores the life that continues beyond loss, with a complicated and yet vital brotherly dynamic reminiscent of Elizabeth Strout's The Burgess Boys. It's a meditation on grief, hope, motherhood, brotherhood, and surrogate fatherhood, and a requiem for marriage, friendship, and family. Above all, it's a novel about what it means—and whether it's possible—to heal.

Leesa Cross-Smith is the author of the collection Every Kiss a War (Mojave River Press, 2014), which was a finalist for both the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and the Iowa Short Fiction Award. She is a consulting editor for Best Small Fictions 2017 and the co-founder of literary magazine WhiskeyPaper. Her work has appeared in Best Small Fictions 2015, SmokeLong Quarterly, Little Fiction, Wigleaf Top 50, Longform Fiction, Carve Magazine, Hobart, NANO Fiction, Monkeybicycle, Pithead Chapel, Gigantic Sequins, Folio, American Short Fiction, Midwestern Gothic, Juked, Word Riot, Sundog Lit, The Rumpus, and many others.

FueR DAMALS, FueR IMMMER
Deutsch von Antonia Zauner

[TB Luebbe 11/2019]
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Published by Hub City Press

Comments

Winner of the Gold Medal in literary fiction at this year's IPPY Awards Read more...

Vietnam: Nha Nam Publishing

Telling her story with care and skill, Cross-Smith never strays into the maudlin nor the overly dramatic, making her characters complicated and real. Readers looking for an authentic portrayal of relationships—romantic and familial; in joy and in sorrow—will be rewarded.