Lawless

"Interweaving the bleak portraits of Walker Evans, the charged landscapes of Annie Dillard, and the breakneck plotting of Cormac McCarthy, Matt Bondurant mines his own family history to offer a novel that's both a gritty, fast-paced tale of bootleggers and car chases and a timeless hard-knock ballad, a myth fixed in the amber of one small community's imagination. "The Wettest County in the World" is a suspense story dashed to tintype smithereens, each one a jewel." -- Elis Avery, author of "The Teahouse Fire"
"In his scintillating new novel, Matt Bondurant explores a crucial period in the history of Virginia and of his family. His gorgeous, precise prose brings to life an amazing cast of characters, including Sherwood Anderson, and the often deadly battles of Prohibition. "The Wettest County in the World" is a remarkably compelling, highly intelligent, and deeply moving novel." -- Margot Livesey, author of "The House on Fortune Street" and "Eva Moves the Furniture"
"Bondurant endows this gritty story with all the puzzle-solving satisfactions of a mystery. It's a gripping, relentless tale, delivered in no-nonsense prose." -- "Publishers Weekly" (starred review)
"Bondurant tells a distinctively American story. The gritty, suspenseful narrative gripped me and wouldn't let me go. It also touched my heart in all the right ways. Matt Bondurant's writing is as full of beauty as it is of verve and grit. Thank God it's legal to write so well." -- Lee Martin, author of River of "Heaven" and "The Bright Forever"
"Bondurant writes fiercely and passionately. Severe violence, thrillingly rendered, pervades this book, which will remind readers of hard-hitting Southern writers such as Cormac McCarthy and Larry Brown. ....The story Bondurant has to tell is riveting, detailed and historical. His knowledge of Southern culture is as deep as his ancestors' knowledge of making whiskey. We are aware from the first page that we are in the hands of a remarkable storyteller." -- "San Francisco Chronicle"
"Bondurant is a nimble writer, especially when it comes to depicting gore and guts. His descriptions of the warped and wounded (a man lying in a hospital bed with "skin blanched like boiled meat; the bedding stained with a yellowish fluid" can leave a reader queasy, but the liveliness of his writing makes it hard for even the most lily-livered to look away.....Bondurant's prose is lyrical.......who can deny the power of a narrative so deeply rooted in childhood imaginings, when a mild and quiet grandfather hung those brass knuckles on the wall?" -- "New York Times Book Review"
"Brilliantly conceived, and so close to home, this novel proves Matt Bondurant's burgeoning talent -- a book for thirsty American readers to guzzle down, a book for all young American writers to admire." -- Alan Cheuse, author of "The Fires"
"[An] utterly engaging fable of bootlegging, revenge and remorse...Bondurant will be compared to Cormac McCarthy. It's warranted: Both have a gift for describing brutality so clearly that we see beauty in the honesty." -Men's Journal
"[An] engrossing novel...[Bondurant is] wonderful at evoking hisotrical atmosphere--the elaborate stills camouflaged in the woods, the music, the drunken gatherings that explode into shattering violence." --Entertainment Weekly
"You have to go back to William Faulkner's novels about the Snopes clan to find the kind of cold-blooded Southern amorality that drives Matt Bondurant's second novel...Bondurant's prose is thick with the kind of blood-soaked descriptions that would do Cormac McCarthy proud." -Washington City Paper
"Bondurant is a nimble writer...[His] prose is lyrical when the whiskey floods in, but also when the blood flows out." -The New York Times Book Review

Matt Bondurant