Where the Dead Sit Talking
Brandon Hobson
ISBN: 9781616958879
Published: February, 2018
Pricing
Paperback $16.00
Description
2018 National Book Award Finalist
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, S...
2018 National Book Award Finalist
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.
Media
“Weird and intimate, like Ottessa Moshfegh's Eileen, Where the Dead Sit Talking takes us to a strange, dangerous place normally kept hidden. From the opening hook, with the unhurried authority of a master, Brandon Hobson initiates the reader into the secret lives of lost and unwanted teenagers trying to survive in an uncaring world. Creepy, sad, yet queerly thrilling.”
—Stewart O'Nan, author of The Speed Queen
“Hobson has a remarkable ability to travel deep into a very dark place and come out plausibly on the side of light.”
—Dawn Raffel, Reader’s Digest
“Hobson writes novels that are very bright and incredibly dark, surprisingly funny and wonderfully complex. ”
—Vol. 1 Brooklyn
“With Deep Ellum, Hobson establishes a city that is as lively as Twin Peaks, a Walden that offers little peace, no meditation, a reversal of transcendentalism.”
—Electric Literature
“Where the Dead Sit Talking is a sensitive and searching exploration of a youth forged in turbulence, in the endless aftermath of displacement and loss. Sequoyah’s voice is powerfully singular—both wounded and wounding—and this novel is a thrilling confirmation of Brandon Hobson’s immense gifts on the page.”
–Laura van den Berg, author of Find Me
“Hobson's eloquent prose and story line will keep literary and general fiction readers turning pages. Its teen protagonists offer interest for young adults.”
—Library Journal
“[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.”
—Booklist
“A strange and powerful Native American bildungsroman ... this novel breathes with a dark, pulsing life of its own.”
—The Tulsa Voice
“A quietly devastating book, full of characters struggling to understand their own troubles and connect with those around them.”
—Vol. 1 Brooklyn
“Hobson's gift to the reader is the hopeful persistence he instills in Sequoyah, despite his challenges with identity and belonging. He is a young man who is clearly scarred but thankfully not defeated.”
—Shelf Awareness
“Dreamlike prose . . . Where the Dead Sit Talking is an exploration of whether it’s possible for a person to heal when all the world sees is a battlefield of scars.”
—San Diego CityBeat
“This is a dark story that depicts the loneliness and pain of unwanted children and the foster care system where they end up . . . authentic and humane.”
—The Oklahoman
“In Where the Dead Sit Talking, Hobson is once again in fine form, delivering a lyrical, somewhat brutal, and very touching coming of age story set in rural Oklahoma in the late 1980s. At once elegant and straightforward, poetic and cold in a way that approximates noir. . . a beautifully written novel.”
—Vol. 1 Brooklyn
“One of those novels that comes around rarely in Native American letters, one that quietly changes everything.”
–Anomaly on Where the Dead Sit Talking
“A powerful testament to one young Native American’s will to survive his lonely existence. Sequoyah’s community and experience is one we all need to know, and Hobson delivers the young man’s story in a deeply profound narrative.”
–KMUW Wichita Public Radio
“An extraordinary book.”
–NPR's Codeswitch
“I was really struck by the intelligence of the book, as well as the significance of the story that he's telling, about what it's like to be a modern Indigenous person in this country, as a Native American, and to be in the foster care system. I was very struck by the plot of it — it's very well written, it's very propulsive, it's very readable for literary fiction, and I would recommend it heartily to book clubs.”
–Min Jin Lee, author of Pachinko
“A dark, twisting, emotional novel about a teenage Cherokee boy dislocated in the foster care system... The novel holds a difficult dialogue on intergenerational trauma, the effects of separating children from their Nations, and the perilous outcomes if we do not make urgent changes to the systems forcing American Indians to assimilate and disconnect. This may be set in the past, however, the same cycles exist today, showing that we have not yet learned the necessary lessons to interrupt the trauma.”