Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence - Award Winning Books Since 2007

Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence - Award Winning Books Since 2007

The Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence award honors Louisiana’s revered storyteller, Ernest J. Gaines, and serves to inspire and recognize rising African-American fiction writers of excellence at a national level. The book award, initiated by donors of the Baton Rouge Area Foundation has become nationally recognized in its role of enhancing visibility of emerging black fiction writers while also expanding the audience for this literature. The annual award of a $15,000 cash prize is to support the writer and help enable her/him to focus on her/his art of writing.

Eligible entries are read by a panel of judges, themselves renowned contributors to the literary world. They are Anthony Grooms, Edward P. Jones, Elizabeth Nunez, Francine Prose and Patricia Towers. Learn more at the Baton Rouge Area Foundation.

2022 — Award Winner

Mother Country
by Jacinda Townsend

Publication Date: May 03, 2022
List Price: $17.00
Format: Paperback, 312 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9781644450871
Imprint: Graywolf Press
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Parent Company: Graywolf Press

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Book Description: 

Saddled with student loans, medical debt, and the sudden news of her infertility after a major car accident, Shannon, an African American woman, follows her boyfriend to Morocco in search of relief. There, in the cobblestoned medina of Marrakech, she finds a toddler in a pink jacket whose face mirrors her own. With the help of her boyfriend and a bribed official, Shannon makes the fateful decision to adopt and raise the girl in Louisville, Kentucky. But the girl already has a mother: Souria, an undocumented Mauritanian woman who was trafficked as a teen, and who managed to escape to Morocco to build another life.

In rendering Souria’s separation from her family across vast stretches of desert and Shannon’s alienation from her mother under the same roof, Jacinda Townsend brilliantly stages cycles of intergenerational trauma and healing. Linked by the girl who has been a daughter to them both, these unforgettable protagonists move toward their inevitable reckoning. Mother Country is a bone-deep and unsparing portrayal of the ethical and emotional claims we make upon one another in the name of survival, in the name of love.


2021 — Award Winner

The Sweetness of Water
by Nathan Harris

Publication Date: Jun 15, 2021
List Price: $28.00
Format: Hardcover, 368 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9780316362481
Imprint: Little, Brown and Company
Publisher: Hachette Book Group
Parent Company: Lagardère Group

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Book Description: 

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER / AN OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK
PRESIDENT OBAMA’S SUMMER 2021 READING LIST

In the spirit of The Known World and The Underground Railroad, “a miraculous debut” —Washington Post

In the waning days of the Civil War, brothers Prentiss and Landry—freed by the Emancipation Proclamation—seek refuge on the homestead of George Walker and his wife, Isabelle. The Walkers, wracked by the loss of their only son to the war, hire the brothers to work their farm, hoping through an unexpected friendship to stanch their grief. Prentiss and Landry, meanwhile, plan to save money for the journey north and a chance to reunite with their mother, who was sold away when they were boys.

Parallel to their story runs a forbidden romance between two Confederate soldiers. The young men, recently returned from the war to the town of Old Ox, hold their trysts in the woods. But when their secret is discovered, the resulting chaos, including a murder, unleashes convulsive repercussions on the entire community. In the aftermath of so much turmoil, it is Isabelle who emerges as an unlikely leader, proffering a healing vision for the land and for the newly free citizens of Old Ox.

With candor and sympathy, debut novelist Nathan Harris creates an unforgettable cast of characters, depicting Georgia in the violent crucible of Reconstruction. Equal parts beauty and terror, as gripping as it is moving, The Sweetness of Water is an epic whose grandeur locates humanity and love amid the most harrowing circumstances.

Harris’ debut novel, The Sweetness of Water, won the 2021 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. Harris’ novel tells a story set in the waning days of the Civil War. The tale is about an unlikely bond between two freedmen who are brothers and the Georgia farmer whose alliance will alter their lives, and his, forever.


2020 — Award Winner

Everywhere You Don’t Belong
by Gabriel Bump

Publication Date: Feb 04, 2020
List Price: $25.95
Format: Hardcover, 272 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9781616208790
Imprint: Algonquin Books
Publisher: Workman Publishing Co., Inc.
Parent Company: Workman Publishing Co., Inc.

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Book Description: 

“This book is astonishing. You’ll be smiling even as your heart is breaking, and you’ll tip willingly into this world Bump offers you because what appears again and again are spectacular beams of light, also called love, also called hope, also called family. Gabriel Bump has established himself as a stunning talent to be reckoned with.” —Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King

In this alternately witty and heartbreaking debut novel, Gabriel Bump gives us an unforgettable protagonist, Claude McKay Love. Claude isn’t dangerous or brilliant—he’s an average kid coping with abandonment, violence, riots, failed love, and societal pressures as he steers his way past the signposts of youth: childhood friendships, basketball tryouts, first love, first heartbreak, picking a college, moving away from home.

Claude just wants a place where he can fit. As a young black man born on the South Side of Chicago, he is raised by his civil rights–era grandmother, who tries to shape him into a principled actor for change; yet when riots consume his neighborhood, he hesitates to take sides, unwilling to let race define his life. He decides to escape Chicago for another place, to go to college, to find a new identity, to leave the pressure cooker of his hometown behind. But as he discovers, he cannot; there is no safe haven for a young black man in this time and place called America.

Percolating with fierceness and originality, attuned to the ironies inherent in our twenty-first-century landscape, Everywhere You Don’t Belong marks the arrival of a brilliant young talent.



2019 — Award Winner

Lot: Stories
by Bryan Washington

Publication Date: Mar 19, 2019
List Price: $25.00
Format: Hardcover, 240 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9780525533672
Imprint: Riverhead Books
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Parent Company: Bertelsmann

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Book Description: 
"Lot is a phenomenal debut, the kind of stories I am always longing to read." —Justin Torres, author of We the Animals
"Brilliant… This is the literature that I’ve been waiting for." —Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of Here Comes the Sun

NAMED ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2019 BY Entertainment Weekly, Buzzfeed, Nylon, Huffington Post, AV Club, The Millions

In the city of Houston - a sprawling, diverse microcosm of America - the son of a black mother and a Latino father is coming of age. He’s working at his family’s restaurant, weathering his brother’s blows, resenting his older sister’s absence. And discovering he likes boys.

Around him, others live and thrive and die in Houston’s myriad neighborhoods: a young woman whose affair detonates across an apartment complex, a ragtag baseball team, a group of young hustlers, hurricane survivors, a local drug dealer who takes a Guatemalan teen under his wing, a reluctant chupacabra.

Bryan Washington’s brilliant, viscerally drawn world vibrates with energy, wit, and the infinite longing of people searching for home. With soulful insight into what makes a community, a family, and a life, Lot explores trust and love in all its unsparing and unsteady forms.

2018 — Award Winner

A Lucky Man: Stories
by Jamel Brinkley

Publication Date: May 08, 2018
List Price: $26.00
Format: Hardcover, 264 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9781555978051
Imprint: Graywolf Press
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Parent Company: Graywolf Press

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Book Description: 

In the nine expansive, searching stories of A Lucky Man, fathers and sons attempt to salvage relationships with friends and family members and confront mistakes made in the past. An imaginative young boy from the Bronx goes swimming with his group from day camp at a backyard pool in the suburbs, and faces the effects of power and privilege in ways he can barely grasp. A teen intent on proving himself a man through the all-night revel of J’Ouvert can’t help but look out for his impressionable younger brother. A pair of college boys on the prowl follow two girls home from a party and have to own the uncomfortable truth of their desires. And at a capoeira conference, two brothers grapple with how to tell the story of their family, caught in the dance of their painful, fractured history.

Jamel Brinkley’s stories, in a debut that announces the arrival of a significant new voice, reflect the tenderness and vulnerability of black men and boys whose hopes sometimes betray them, especially in a world shaped by race, gender, and class―where luck may be the greatest fiction of all.



2017 — Award Winner

The Talented Ribkins
by Ladee Hubbard

Publication Date: Aug 08, 2018
List Price: $16.99
Format: Paperback, 304 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9781612197289
Imprint: Melville House
Publisher: Melville House
Parent Company: Melville House

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Book Description: 
“For sheer reading pleasure Ladee Hubbard’s original and wildly inventive novel is in a class by itself.” —Toni Morrison

“The Talented Ribkins is a charming and delightful debut novel with a profound heart, and Ladee Hubbard’s voice is a welcome original.” —Mary Gaitskill

• An INDIE NEXT 2017 pick
• Winner of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award
• Winner of the William Faulkner - William Wisdom Prize

At seventy-two, Johnny Ribkins shouldn’t have such problems: He’s got one week to come up with the money he stole from his mobster boss or it’s curtains.

What may or may not be useful to Johnny as he flees is that he comes from an African-American family that has been gifted with super powers that are a bit, well, odd. Okay, very odd. For example, Johnny’s father could see colors no one else could see. His brother could scale perfectly flat walls. His cousin belches fire. And Johnny himself can make precise maps of any space you name, whether he’s been there or not.

In the old days, the Ribkins family tried to apply their gifts to the civil rights effort, calling themselves The Justice Committee. But when their, eh, superpowers proved insufficient, the group fell apart. Out of frustration Johnny and his brother used their talents to stage a series of burglaries, each more daring than the last.

Fast forward a couple decades and Johnny’s on a race against the clock to dig up loot he’s stashed all over Florida. His brother is gone, but he has an unexpected sidekick: his brother’s daughter, Eloise, who has a special superpower of her own.

Inspired by W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous essay “The Talented Tenth” and fuelled by Ladee Hubbard’s marvelously original imagination, The Talented Ribkins is a big-hearted debut novel about race, class, politics, and the unique gifts that, while they may cause some problems from time to time, bind a family together.

2016 — Award Winner

The Birds of Opulence
by Crystal Wilkinson

Publication Date: Mar 07, 2016
List Price: $24.95
Format: Hardcover, 208 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9780813166919
Imprint: University Press of Kentucky
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Parent Company: University Press of Kentucky

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Book Description: 
From the critically acclaimed, award-winning author of Blackberries, Blackberries and Water Street comes an astonishing new novel. A lyrical exploration of love and loss, The Birds of Opulence centers on several generations of women in a bucolic southern black township as they live with and sometimes surrender to madness.

The Goode-Brown family, led by matriarch and pillar of the community Minnie Mae, is plagued by old secrets and embarrassment over mental illness and illegitimacy. Meanwhile, single mother Francine Clark is haunted by her dead, lightning-struck husband and forced to fight against both the moral judgment of the community and her own rebellious daughter, Mona. The residents of Opulence struggle with vexing relationships to the land, to one another, and to their own sexuality. As the members of the youngest generation watch their mothers and grandmothers pass away, they live with the fear of going mad themselves and must fight to survive.

Crystal Wilkinson offers up Opulence and its people in lush, poetic detail. It is a world of magic, conjuring, signs, and spells, but also of harsh realities that only love—and love that’s handed down—can conquer. At once tragic and hopeful, this captivating novel is a story about another time, rendered for our own.

2015 — Award Winner

Book Description: 
From the PEN/Faulkner finalist and critically acclaimed author of Hold It ’Til It Hurts comes a dark and socially provocative Southern-fried comedy about four UC Berkeley students who stage a dramatic protest during a Civil War reenactment—a fierce, funny, tragic work from a bold new writer.Welcome to Braggsville. The City that Love Built in the Heart of Georgia. Population 712Born and raised in the heart of old Dixie, D’aron Davenport finds himself in unfamiliar territory his freshman year at UC Berkeley. Two thousand miles and a world away from his childhood, he is a small-town fish floundering in the depths of a large, hyper-liberal pond. Caught between the prosaic values of his rural hometown and the intellectualized multicultural cosmopolitanism of Berzerkeley, the nineteen-year-old white kid is uncertain about his place until one disastrous party brings him three idiosyncratic best friends: Louis, a “kung-fu comedian" from California; Candice, an earnest do-gooder claiming Native roots from Iowa; and Charlie, an introspective inner-city black teen from Chicago. They dub themselves the “4 Little Indians.”But everything changes in the group’s alternative history class, when D’aron lets slip that his hometown hosts an annual Civil War reenactment, recently rebranded “Patriot Days.” His announcement is met with righteous indignation, and inspires Candice to suggest a “performative intervention” to protest the reenactment. Armed with youthful self-importance, makeshift slave costumes, righteous zeal, and their own misguided ideas about the South, the 4 Little Indians descend on Braggsville. Their journey through backwoods churches, backroom politics, Waffle Houses, and drunken family barbecues is uproarious to start, but will have devastating consequences.With the keen wit of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and the deft argot of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, T. Geronimo Johnson has written an astonishing, razor-sharp satire. Using a panoply of styles and tones, from tragicomic to Southern Gothic, he skewers issues of class, race, intellectual and political chauvinism, Obamaism, social media, and much more.A literary coming-of-age novel for a new generation, written with tremendous social insight and a unique, generous heart, Welcome to Braggsville reminds us of the promise and perils of youthful exuberance, while painting an indelible portrait of contemporary America.

2014 — Award Winner

The Residue Years
by Mitchell S. Jackson

Publication Date: May 06, 2014
List Price: $17.00
Format: Paperback, 352 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9781620400296
Imprint: Bloomsbury USA
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Parent Company: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

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Book Description: 

Mitchell S. Jackson grew up black in a neglected neighborhood in America’s whitest city, Portland, Oregon. In the ’90s, those streets and beyond had fallen under the shadow of crack cocaine and its familiar mayhem. In his commanding debut autobiographical novel, Mitchell writes what it was to come of age in that time and place, with a breakout voice that’s nothing less than extraordinary.

The Residue Years switches between the perspectives of a young man, Champ, and his mother, Grace. Grace is just out of a drug treatment program, trying to stay clean and get her kids back. Champ is trying to do right by his mom and younger brothers, and dreams of reclaiming the only home he and his family have ever shared. But selling crack is the only sure way he knows to achieve his dream. In this world of few options and little opportunity, where love is your strength and your weakness, this family fights for family and against what tears one apart.



2013 — Award Winner

The Cutting Season: A Novel
by Attica Locke

Publication Date: Sep 17, 2013
List Price: $15.99
Format: Paperback, 384 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9780061802065
Imprint: Amistad
Publisher: HarperCollins
Parent Company: News Corp

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Book Description: 
From Attica Locke, a writer and producer of FOX’s Empire:“The Cutting Season is a rare murder mystery with heft, a historical novel that thrills, a page-turner that makes you think. Attica Locke is a dazzling writer with a conscience.”—Dolen Perkins-Valdez, New York Times bestselling author of WenchAfter her breathtaking debut novel, Black Water Rising, won acclaim from major publications and respected crime fiction masters like James Ellroy and George Pelecanos, Locke returns with The Cutting Season, a second novel easily as gripping and powerful as her first—a heart-pounding thriller that interweaves two murder mysteries, one on Belle Vie, a historic landmark in the middle of Lousiana’s Sugar Cane country, and one involving a slave gone missing more than one hundred years earlier. Black Water Rising was nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, an Edgar Award, and an NAACP Image Award, and was short-listed for the Orange Prize in the U.K.

2012 — Award Winner

We Are Taking Only What We Need
by Stephanie Powell Watts

Publication Date: Feb 18, 2018
List Price: $16.99
Format: Paperback, 240 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9780062749901
Imprint: Ecco
Publisher: HarperCollins
Parent Company: News Corp

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Book Description: 

In these powerfully rendered, prizewinning stories, working-class African Americans across the South strive for meaning and search for direction in lives shaped by forces beyond their control

The ten stories in this resonant collection deal with both the ties that bind and the gulf that separates generations, from children confronting the fallibility of their own parents for the first time to adults finding themselves forced to start over again and again.

In “Highway 18” a young Jehovah’s Witness going door to door with an expert field-service partner from up north is at a crossroads: will she go to college or continue to serve the church? “If You Hit Randall County, You’ve Gone Too Far” tells of a family trying to make it through a tense celebratory dinner for a son just out on bail. And in the collection’s title story, a young girl experiences loss for the first time in the fallout from her father’s relationship with her babysitter.

Startling, intimate, and prescient on their own, these stories build to a kaleidoscopic understanding of both the individual and the collective black experience over the last fifty years in the American South. With We Are Taking Only What We Need, Stephanie Powell Watts has crafted an incredibly assured and emotionally affecting meditation on everything from the large institutional forces to the small interpersonal moments that impress upon us and direct our lives.

“Watts shows us people, real souls like the people we sit next to on the bus, people who live down the hall, people who could be relatives.” —Edward P. Jones


2011 — Award Winner

How To Read The Air
by Dinaw Mengestu

Publication Date: Oct 14, 2010
List Price: $25.95
Format: Hardcover, 320 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9781594487705
Imprint: Riverhead Hardcover
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Parent Company: Bertelsmann

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Book Description: 
From the prizewinning international literary star: the searing and powerful story of one man’s search for redemption. Dinaw Mengestu’s first novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, earned the young writer comparisons to Bellow, Fitzgerald, and Naipaul, and garnered ecstatic critical praise and awards around the world for its haunting depiction of the immigrant experience. Now Mengestu enriches the themes that defined his debut with a heartbreaking literary masterwork about love, family, and the power of imagination, which confirms his reputation as one of the brightest talents of his generation.One early September afternoon, Yosef and Mariam, young Ethiopian immigrants who have spent all but their first year of marriage apart, set off on a road trip from their new home in Peoria, Illinois, to Nashville, Tennessee, in search of a new identity as an American couple. Soon, their son, Jonas, will be born in Illinois. Thirty years later, Yosef has died, and Jonas needs to make sense of the volatile generational and cultural ties that have forged him. How can he envision his future without knowing what has come before? Leaving behind his marriage and job in New York, Jonas sets out to retrace his mother and father’s trip and weave together a family history that will take him from the war-torn Ethiopia of his parents’ youth to his life in the America of today, a story—real or invented—that holds the possibility of reconciliation and redemption.Watch a Video

2010 — Award Winner

Big Machine: A Novel
by Victor Lavalle

Publication Date: Mar 09, 2010
List Price: $18.00
Format: Paperback, 370 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9780385527996
Imprint: Spiegel & Grau
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Parent Company: Bertelsmann

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Book Description: 
A fiendishly imaginative comic novel about doubt, faith, and the monsters we carry within us.


Ricky Rice was as good as invisible: a middling hustler, recovering dope fiend, and traumatized suicide cult survivor running out the string of his life as a porter at a bus depot in Utica, New York. Until one day a letter appears, summoning him to the frozen woods of Vermont. There, Ricky is inducted into a band of paranormal investigators comprised of former addicts and petty criminals, all of whom had at some point in their wasted lives heard The Voice: a mysterious murmur on the wind, a disembodied shout, or a whisper in an empty room that may or may not be from God.

Evoking the disorienting wonder of writers like Haruki Murakami and Kevin Brockmeier, but driven by Victor LaValle’s perfectly pitched comic sensibility Big Machine is a mind-rattling literary adventure about sex, race, and the eternal struggle between faith and doubt.

2009 — Award Winner

Holding Pattern: Stories
by Jeffery Renard Allen

Publication Date: Sep 02, 2008
List Price: $15.00
Format: Paperback, 227 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9781555975098
Imprint: Graywolf Press
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Parent Company: Graywolf Press

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Book Description: 

The world of Jeffery Renard Allen’s stunning short-story collection is a place like no other. A recognizable city, certainly, but one in which a man might sprout wings or copper pennies might fall from the skies onto your head. Yet these are no fairy tales. The hostility, the hurt, is all too human.

The protagonists circle each other with steely determination: a grandson taunts his grandmother, determined to expose her secret past; for years, a sister tries to keep a menacing neighbor away from her brother; and in the local police station, an officer and prisoner try to break each other’s resolve.

In all the stories, Allen calibrates the mounting tension with exquisite timing, in mesmerizing prose that has won him comparisons with Joyce and Faulkner. Holding Pattern is a captivating collection by a prodigiously talented writer.



2008 — Award Winner

Like Trees, Walking: A Novel
by Ravi Howard

Publication Date: Jan 22, 2008
List Price: $13.95
Format: Paperback, 272 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9780060529604
Imprint: Harper Paperbacks
Publisher: HarperCollins
Parent Company: News Corp

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Book Description: 

Based on the true story of a modern-day lynching in America, Ravi Howard’s widely acclaimed debut novel exposes one of the most tragic chapters in the history of the American South.

On the morning of March 21, 1981, in Mobile, Alabama, nineteen-year-old Michael Donald was found dead, his body badly beaten and hanging from a tree on Herndon Avenue. Brothers Paul and Roy Deacon of the Deacon Memorial Funeral Home are called upon to bury their close friend and classmate, and the experience will leave them forever changed. Along with other residents of their hometown, the Deacon brothers must struggle to understand the circumstances surrounding Donald’s murder—the city’s first lynching in more than sixty years and a gruesome reminder of racial inequalities in the New South.



2007 — Award Winner

A Killing in This Town: A Novel
by Olympia Vernon

Publication Date: Jan 11, 2007
List Price: $12.00
Format: Paperback, 256 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9780802142962
Imprint: Grove Press
Publisher: Grove Atlantic, Inc.
Parent Company: Grove Atlantic, Inc.

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Book Description: 

Award-winning author Olympia Vernon’s third novel, A Killing in This Town, is a taut, poetic masterpiece that exhumes a horrific epoch from the annals of the American South.

There is a menace in the woods of Bullock County, Mississippi, and not only for the black man destined to be lynched when a white boy comes of age. The white men who work at the Plant are in danger, too, but they refuse to heed Earl Thomas’s urgent message that the factory is slowly killing them; turning a deaf ear to the black pastor. Thomas knows he should try to deliver the message again, but he hears the blood of his murdered friend calling to him from the ground, and fears that he will be the next black man to be dragged to his death. Adam Pickens, a white boy now on the eve of his thirteenth birthday, isn’t sure he wants to wear the garb being readied for him by the Klan seamstress, or participate in the town’s ugly ritual. It is only when Gill Mender?a man haunted by past sins?returns that redemption seems possible. A transfixing and pivotal work of fiction, A Killing in This Town exposes the fragile hierarchy of a society poisoned by hatred, and shows the power of an individual to stand up to the demons of history and bring the cycle of violence to an end.