Sugar run - mesha maren

A heady admixture of explosive plot and taut, burnished prose .

Mesha Maren writes like a force of nature.

--Lauren Groff, author of Florida In 1989, Jodi McCarty is seventeen years old when shes sentenced to life in prison.

When shes released eighteen years later, she finds herself at a Greyhound bus stop, reeling from the shock of unexpected freedom but determined to chart a better course for herself.

Not yet able to return to her lost home in the Appalachian Mountains, she heads south in search of someone she left behind, as a way of finally making amends.

There, she meets and falls in love with Miranda, a troubled young mother living in a motel room with her children.

Together they head toward what they hope will be a fresh start.

But what do you do with your past--and with a town and a family that refuses to forget, or to change? Set within the charged insularity of rural West Virginia, Mesha Marens Sugar Run is a searing and gritty debut about making a break for another life, the use and treachery of makeshift families, and how, no matter the distance we think weve traveled from the mistakes weve made, too often we find ourselves standing in precisely the place we began.