Sap Rising

In this spare and mesmerizing debut work of fiction, Christine Lincoln takes us inside the hearts and minds of African Americans whose lives unfold against a vividly evoked Southern rural landscape. As they navigate between the old and the new, between youth and adulthood, they find themselves choosing between the comforts of what they trust unquestioningly and the fearsome excitements of what they might come to know.

An abandoned seven-year-old girl living inside a fantasy of invisibility … a young woman weighing the life she’s expected to want against the freedom that will transport her to the unexpected … a boy whose world is both expanded and contracted by stories he hears from a beautiful stranger—the characters who inhabit this
profoundly moving collection are brought to life with a remarkably light touch and an extraordinary depth
of insight and emotion.

Christine Lincoln possesses a gift of great originality. In Sap Rising, she proves herself one of those rare writers whose work transcends its own rich particularity to speak with stunning clarity to the most fundamental elements of the human experience.