Southern Cross the Dog-------pan macmillan
When the Great Flood of 1927 devastates Mississippi, eight-year-old Robert Chatham loses everything.
Robert’s
adventures in the brooding swamplands – from hard labour to
imprisonment to thwarted love – are full of courage, danger and
heartbreak. This is story of how a small, hurt boy becomes a tough young
man: forced to choose between the lure of the future and the claims of
his past.
Set against one of the great American landscapes,
Southern Cross the Dog is a mesmerizing and savagely beautiful novel. It
marks the arrival of Bill Cheng as a writer of astonishing gifts.
Bill
Cheng offers a grand and precious novel . . . colorful and
unforgettable characters and landscapes both threatening and inviting.
His work is lush and so very often poetic. Southern Cross the Dog
has large and small echoes of masterful works, but we should not make
any mistake—Cheng has carved out his own creative and accomplished path.
His novel is a welcome and necessary addition to a society where good
and compelling writing and stories are not as easy to find as some may
think.—Edward P. Jones (Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Known World and All Aunt Hagar’s Children)
