By Katy Simpson Smith

From the writer of the hugely acclaimed the tale of Land and Sea comes a charming novel, set within the overdue eighteenth-century American South, that follows a unique team of companions—an escaped slave, a white orphan, and a Creek Indian—who are being tracked down for murder.

In 1788, 3 males converge within the southern woods of what's now Alabama. Cat, an emotionally scarred white guy from South Carolina, is at the run after forsaking his domestic. Bob is a talkative black guy fleeing slavery on a Pensacola sugar plantation, Istillicha, edged out of his Creek town’s management, is certain by way of honor to hunt retribution.

In the few days they spend jointly, the makeshift trio commits a surprising homicide that quickly has the forces of the legislation bearing down upon them. despatched to choose up their path, a probing French tracker named Le Clerc needs to make a decision which has a better declare: speedy justice, or his personal interest approximately how 3 such disparate, determined males might act in unison.

Katy Simpson Smith skillfully brings into concentration males whose lives are either catastrophic and entire of hope—and illuminates the lives of the ladies they left in the back of. faraway from being anomalies, Cat, Bob, and Istillicha are the thrashing middle of the hot the USA that Le Clerc struggles to understand. In those territories stuck among ecu, American, and local international locations, a desolate tract exists the place 4 males grapple with the significance of kin, the stain of guilt, and the competing forces of strength, love, race, and freedom—questions that proceed to hang-out us this present day.