A newly discovered nineteenth-century novel about West Virginia breaking away from Virginia, set amid the cannel coal boom and featuring an interracial abolitionist movement.

Based mostly on his own experiences, Theophile Maher’s local color novel Cannel Coal Oil Days challenges many popular ideas about antebellum Appalachia, bringing it more fully into the broader story of the United States. Written in 1887, discovered in 2018, and published here for the first time, it offers a narrative of life between 1859 and 1861 in what was then western Virginia as it became West Virginia.

Cannel coal (a soft form of coal whose oil, when distilled, was competitive in the lighting oil business after overfishing reduced the whale oil supply) was at the center of one of Appalachia’s first extractive industries. Using the development of coal oil manufacturing in the Kanawha valley as its launching point, Maher’s semiautobiographical novel tells of a series of interrelated changes, each reflecting larger transformations in the United States as a whole. It shows how coal oil manufacturing was transformed from an amateurish endeavor to a more professional industry, with implications for Appalachian environment and labor. Then, Maher foreshadows the coming Progressive Era by insisting on moral and environmental reforms based in democratic and Christian principles. Finally, he tells the story of the coming of the Civil War to the region, as the novel’s protagonist, a mining engineer, works closely with a Black family to organize the local abolitionist mountain folk into a Union militia to aid in the secession of West Virginia from Virginia.

In John B. Wright’s debut environmental mystery, Matt Solberg is charged with discovering who is lighting fires in the forests that surround Missoula, Montana. A geographer with a deep personal need to bring people out of danger, Matt leads a search and rescue team whose job is to head directly into the mouth of hell, hiking into blazing backcountry to find missing residents. Matt and his team not only rely on their hard-won knowledge of Montana’s wild landscape, but also on Matt’s mentor, Dr. Bill Knight, a fire ecologist who understands the burning beast better than anyone.
 
When a suspicious fire destroys the mansion of a movie star, Matt must hike in to find his missing daughter and save her from the chaos. Then fires begin to explode everywhere as climate change drives temperatures over 100 degrees and rain refuses to fall, threatening thousands of homes. Who is setting these fires? Is it the Montana Tree Monkeys, an eco-radical group determined to scare off the newcomers? Or is it a retired smokejumper with an axe to grind about the encroaching mansions? Could it be Paladin, a shadowy figure leaving strange clues around the state? It’s Matt’s mission to find answers to these questions during a summer of heat, smoke, and unimaginable loss. Weaving together gripping drama and intriguing fire science, Fire Scars reveals the physical and psychological wounds we all carry—and the power we have to overcome.
 
 

“Emotionally wrenching. . . . Haunting (and haunted) in the best possible way.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Darkly compelling.” —Tom Perrotta

In the fall of 2018, a bomb goes off at a water-bottling plant in the mountains of southwest Virginia, an incident the FBI declares an act of ecoterrorism. Arrested at the scene is Chris Bright, a mountain hermit with a long history of activism. Unaccounted for—and presumed dead—is Mara Wood, an installation artist who in the last two years has lost her son and left her husband.

But Mara’s estranged husband David cannot quite believe she is dead, and as he goes about reconstructing the story of what happened, he begins to imagine an alternate narrative—one in which their son doesn’t die and his wife doesn’t leave him, one in which his wife doesn’t carry on a secret relationship with Chris Bright, a man bent on fighting back against the environmental despoliation of his Appalachian home. Lioness is a page-turning, heart-wrenching examination of extremism: What pushes people to act violently, and is that violence ever justified?

A compelling story of characters enduring various hardships in rural New Mexico.
 
This debut novel tells the story of nine-year-old Raymond, nicknamed “Ray Moon” by Molly, his adoptive caretaker, a waitress, and the former partner of his recently deceased uncle. These two outcasts rely on one another for survival, and their bond forms the heart of this book. Living in a trailer atop a mesa in the high desert of New Mexico in 1968, Raymond ages quickly amid hostile circumstances. With the help of a keen imagination that Molly inspires, he navigates various forms of loss and exploitation amid enduring hardship.
 
Kevin Honold’s deft and trance-like prose is interspersed with sharp insights and brings attention to the displacement of Native Americans, the hardships of capitalism, the ills of misogyny, and the raw hurt of living a displaced or marginalized life. This is a story of endurance, memory, and unceasing change.
 
Molly was selected by Dan Chaon as the winner of the 2020 Autumn House Fiction Prize.
 

A compelling story of characters enduring various hardships in rural New Mexico.
 
This debut novel tells the story of nine-year-old Raymond, nicknamed “Ray Moon” by Molly, his adoptive caretaker, a waitress, and the former partner of his recently deceased uncle. These two outcasts rely on one another for survival, and their bond forms the heart of this book. Living in a trailer atop a mesa in the high desert of New Mexico in 1968, Raymond ages quickly amid hostile circumstances. With the help of a keen imagination that Molly inspires, he navigates various forms of loss and exploitation amid enduring hardship.
 
Kevin Honold’s deft and trance-like prose is interspersed with sharp insights and brings attention to the displacement of Native Americans, the hardships of capitalism, the ills of misogyny, and the raw hurt of living a displaced or marginalized life. This is a story of endurance, memory, and unceasing change.
 
Molly was selected by Dan Chaon as the winner of the 2020 Autumn House Fiction Prize.
 

In this unflinching, dramatic adventure, modern-day wildland firefighters and cattle rustlers struggle for survival in a changing western landscape. Braiding the stories of two firefighters (Morgan and Jeremy) and an abrasive laundromat custodian turned cattle-rustling grandmother (Jacklynn), This Here Is Devil’s Work is a fiery ride through the small towns of Nevada and Montana and the rugged expanse that connects them.

A twelve-year veteran of the fireline, Morgan believes he knows what his teenage half-brother (Jeremy) needs to do to shrug off boyhood: spend a single season fighting forest fires to earn money for auto mechanic school. But when Jeremy joins the Ruby Mountain Hotshots and earns the respect and admiration of their fire boss (Bailey), Morgan must battle his own demons before they destroy him.

Meanwhile, life hasn’t been easy on Jacklynn—she longs to escape the small town in Montana where she has lived her whole life and reunite with her daughter and grandson in Tucson. Jacklynn wants to make up for a lifetime of missteps by protecting the boy and making sure her daughter stays on course. On the same day that an attractive stranger waltzes into her life, an opportunity for life-changing money presents itself in the form of a dozen pregnant heifers. The only trouble is, they aren’t hers—not yet, anyway.

Morgan and Jacklynn’s paths cross when lightning ignites a blaze in the untamed Montana wilderness, and their choices force each other into
the fury.

Set against the backdrop of wildfires raging across the West and the firefighters who continue to put their lives on the line, This Here Is Devil’s Work explores how love and loneliness can sour, and how they can eventually lead to desperate and self-destructive acts even for those people we consider heroic.