Join us for our latest collaboration with The Booksellers at Laurelwood as we welcome Jamie Kornegay to Memphis to read from and sign his first novel, SOIL. Jamie is also the owner of Turnrow Book Co., in Greenwood, MS, so please help us celebrate this writer who daily champions other writers in his work as an independent bookseller.With elements of rural noir, dark comedy and domestic dysfunction, SOIL – published by Simon & Schuster – is a modern tragedy that pays homage to Mississippi’s great literary tradition — from William Faulkner to Larry Brown and Barry Hannah — and adds a manic dose of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment for good measure.

Distrustful of modern society, environmental scientist Jay Mize moves his family off the grid to a stretch of riverbottom farmland in the Mississippi hills, where he hopes to position himself at the forefront of a revolution in agriculture. After suffering drought, flood, pestilence and family turmoil, Jay uncovers a dead body in his water-logged field. Rather than alert the authorities, he mounts a paranoid cover-up, which invites more unwanted trouble to his sacred homestead.

Beset by a growing madness, Jay is pitted against his estranged wife, who has become unhinged by her own trials, and a local deputy, whose interest in the family is not strictly in the pursuit of justice. Through a maze of misperceptions and personal obsessions, these characters endeavor — however clumsily — to uphold their own sense of honor as they tumble toward a showdown in the treacherous mudflats.