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by David Connerley Nahm
The boys howled. In their pockets, eye droppers of gin. They skipped to their car with eyes wide open and sped into the night, down gray county roads, grieving over nothing they could name, beating the dashboard with their fists. Near dawn they broke into a cemetery and pissed on the first angel they could find.
Leah's little brother, Jacob, disappeared when the pair were younger, a tragedy that haunts her still. When a grown man arrives at the non-profit Leah directs claiming to be Jacob, she is wrenched back to her childhood, an iridescent tableau of family joy and strife, swimming at the lake, sneaking candy, late-night fears, and the stories told to quell them.
Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky is a wrecking-ball of a novel that attempts to give meaning and poetry to everything that comprises small-town life in central Kentucky. Listen: they are the ghost stories that children tell one another, the litter that skirts the gulley, the lines at department stores.
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Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky reads as though Anne Carson and Maggie Nelson wrote a more focused Antwerp and based it in central Kentucky. A gorgeous, haunting, prismatic jewel of a book.
"[An] intriguing debut... The story moves constantly between past and present, often from one paragraph to the next, creating a nonlinear sense of time, in which Leah's memories are both more fluid and more urgent than her day-to-day adult life." - Publisher's Weekly
"Starred Review. A powerful first novel, the kind that makes you want to stop people in the street to tell them about it." - Library Journal
This information about Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
David Connerley Nahm was born and raised in Kentucky. He currently lives in the mountains of Virginia with his wife, where he practices law and teaches college. His writing has appeared in McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Eyeshot, and Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet.
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