Tues., May 22nd, 2012 from 12-2pm
@ The Lazy Goat, $25/person

Western North Carolina native Wiley Cash writes about his homeland in his debut novel, A Land More Kind than Home (William Morrow, hardcover, $24.99, releases 4/17/12), a story about a child who witnesses the unthinkable during a church healing service, forcing him to question his ideas about family and faith.

Religion is supposed to shield children from the horrors of the world, but one Sunday, nine-year-old Jess Hall watches as his autistic brother is called into a little church in the mountains of North Carolina. What happens next forces Jess to question everything he once believed about his family and his faith. Clem Barefield, the local sheriff, arrives to find a group of charismatic believers who are unwilling to utter a word about the things Jess has seen. At the center of the mystery is Carson Chambliss, a snake-handling ex-convict-turned-preacher whose past is just as mysterious as the power he claims to possess.

The first person Sheriff Barefield turns to is Adelaide Lyle, the church matriarch, a woman whose good-sense brand of religion straddles the divide between blind faith and cold fact. Her understanding of both the spiritual and the natural world makes her predictions of a violent reckoning just as viable as they are unavoidable. Jess is the lynchpin for this violence, and he tries to navigate an adult world where the truth is something hidden from children, even if they know things about it that adults do not.

A Land More Kind than Home is a literary thriller, thick with stories and characters connected by faith, infidelity, addiction, and a sense of hope that is as tragic as it is unforgettable. Readers of Ron Rash and John Hart will fall in love with novelist Wiley Cash.

About the author:
Wiley Cash is from Western North Carolina, a region that figures prominently in his fiction. His stories have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Roanoke Review, and The Carolina Quarterly. A Land More Kind than Home is his first novel.

Wiley holds a B.A. in Literature from the University of North Carolina – Asheville, an M.A. in English from the University of North Carolina – Greensboro, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana – Lafayette. He has received grants and fellowships from the Asheville Area Arts Council, the Thomas Wolfe Society, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo.

He and his wife currently live in West Virginia where he teaches fiction writing and American literature at Bethany College. He also teaches in the Low-Residency M.F.A. Program in Fiction and Nonfiction Writing at Southern New Hampshire University.