Fiction. This collection of linked stories follows the curses of a father, visited upon the Nash family over the course of three generations, spanning the 1960's to the present. In rich, moving episodes, readers engage the lives of stunned-straight racists, scarred veterans, doomed lovers, would-be assassins, gun-toting grandmothers, nascent female crime-bosses, ambivalent mourners, big-time drug- running, and bewildered survivors trying to make sense of it all. This is not a family—it's a world; this is not a book—it's an indictment; these words are not written—they're howled.
"Digging Up The Bones is one of the most gorgeous and wrenching books I've read in years. In the tradition of Jayne Anne Phillips and Dan Woodrell, Marlowe has given us a cast of unforgettable characters marked by abuse, addiction, and—against all odds—hope. The prose is glass clear, the humor is dark, and the story is as sweeping—and as strong—as the Kentucky hills."—Bret Anthony Johnston,
Corpus Christi
and
Remember Me Like This
"Marlowe has created a world at once strange and familiar, where love and violence move in lockstep, and where the sound of one family's barbaric yawp echoes over rooftops and reminds us of our own. This is a brave, brilliant book."—Josh Emmons,
The Loss of Leon Meed
"Nothing stays buried in DIGGING UP THE BONES. The Nash family comes roaring off the page; these are characters who struggle with the generational brutalities of the American working poor, and—in doing so—show us human nature at its weakest, at its most vulnerable and most raw."—Peyton Marshall,
Good House
"Marlowe adeptly weaves a complex tale of the ways in which the often horrific behavior we heap upon each other reverberates across generations. His prose is harshly lyrical, demanding and dynamic, and evokes with exquisite accuracy this Kentucky holler from which no one emerges unscathed."—Colette Sartor