In West Mills
by De’Shawn Charles Winslow
Publication Date: Jun 04, 2019
List Price: $26.00
Format: Hardcover, 272 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9781635573404
Imprint: Bloomsbury Publishing
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Parent Company: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Read an Excerpt from In West Mills
Description of In West Mills by De’Shawn Charles Winslow
For readers of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie and The Turner House, an intimately told story about a woman living by her own rules and the rural community that struggles to understand her.
Azalea “Knot” Centre is determined to live life as she pleases. Let the people of West Mills say what they will; the neighbors’ gossip won’t keep Knot from what she loves best: cheap moonshine, nineteenth-century literature, and the company of men. And yet, Knot is starting to learn that her freedom comes at a high price. Alone in her one-room shack, ostracized from her relatives and cut off from her hometown, Knot turns to her neighbor, Otis Lee Loving, in search of some semblance of family and home.
Otis Lee is eager to help. A lifelong fixer, Otis Lee is determined to steer his friends and family away from decisions that will cause them heartache and ridicule. After his failed attempt as a teenager to help his older sister, Otis Lee discovers a possible path to redemption in the chaos Knot brings to his doorstep. But while he’s busy trying to fix Knot’s life, Otis Lee finds himself powerless to repair the many troubles within his own family, as the long-buried secrets of his troubled past begin to come to light.
Set in an African American community in rural North Carolina from 1941 to 1987, In West Mills is a magnificent, big-hearted small-town story about family, friendship, storytelling, and the redemptive power of love.
“There are plenty of adjectives that could describe Winslow’s debut: endearing, certainly. Hilarious, absolutely. Charming, for days. But none of them are adequate to this quietly complicated, impossibly big-hearted novel about family, migration and the unbearable difficulties of love. Here’s a cast of characters you won’t soon forget.” —Ayana Mathis, bestselling author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie
Books similiar to In West Mills may be found in the categories below:
- Fiction / African American & Black / General
- Fiction / Historical / General
- Fiction / Literary
- Fiction / Small Town & Rural
- Fiction / Southern