A harrowing, redemptive coming-of-age journey from youthful innocence to the darkest levels of addiction and human experience. When tragedy strikes her family, seventeen-year-old Marie Massey runs away from a safe, privileged life in her small college town and into the arms of a much older man in a neighboring Kentucky county. Though innocent at first, Marie’s budding relationship with the charismatic, thirty-year-old Bobo Owens and his family of bootleggers and drug dealers sets in motion a cataclysmic chain of events from which no one will emerge unscathed. In this stark reflection of the many challenges rural young people face in the heart of the opioid epidemic, debut novelist Carrie Mullins presents a haunting narrative about the ways addiction can destroy American communities. Published in 2016 by Old Cove Press

Carrie Mullins is a fiction writer whose work has been published in Chicago Quarterly Review, Appalachian Heritage, Kudzu, and the online literary journal Still. Her short story “Cell-Life” appears in Appalachia Now: Short Stories of Contemporary Appalachia (Bottom Dog Press, 2015). Mullins grew up in Mt. Vernon, Kentucky, where she still lives. A finalist for the Weatherford Award for fiction, Night Garden is her first novel.