Work Like Any Other

A farm was no place for an electrician. He’d said it enough times… Every day, Marie asked him what he was going to do, and every day, he said “Anything but work this goddamned farm” When Marie Martin’s father dies, leaving her his fast declining farm she, her husband and son are forced to uproot their life to take it on. Marie’s huband, Roscoe is an electrician; a new world of power slowing spreading its fingers across 1920’s America, too slowly to have reached rural Alabama. Electricity is not just Roscoe’s job; it is his calling and his pride. When he is forced to abandon his trade to take up farming, the change threatens to destabilise his marriage, his relationship with his son and his own sense of self. Then Roscoe discovers a way to siphon electricity from the state, it comes with the promise of regeneration, for the farm and for Roscoe’s own ailing family unit but it also comes at a dreadful cost. For when a man is electrocuted on their land, Roscoe is arrested he is forced to confront everything he has gambled and lost. Placing itself perfectly alongside acclaimed work by Philipp Meyer, Jane Smiley and J M Coetzee, this powerful debut considers the price of identity, the impact of dispossession and what is left behind when a life is fundamentally shattered. “A striking debut about love and redemption, the heavy burdens of family and guilt and learning how to escape them. Powerfully told and lyrically written, there is not a false note in this book. Reeves is a major new talent." Philipp Meyer, author ofThe Son