Soil

Written by Jamie Kornegay

Narrated by Brian Hutchison

A darkly comic debut novel by an independent bookseller about an idealistic young farmer who moves his family to a Mississippi flood basin, suffers financial ruin-and becomes increasingly paranoid he's being framed for murder. It all began with a simple dream. An ambitious young environmental scientist hoped to establish a sustainable farm on a small patch of river-bottom land nestled among the Mississippi hills. Jay Mize convinced his wife Sandy to move their six-year-old son away from town and to a rich and lush parcel where Jacob could run free and Jay could pursue the dream of a new and progressive agriculture for the twenty-first century. He did not know that within a year he'd be ruined, that flood and pestilence would invade his fledgling farm or that his wife and son would leave him to pick up the pieces by himself. "Let us stand, brothers and sisters, to applaud the arrival of an exquisitely deranged new voice to American fiction. Dig your hands into this Soil to find gutty and peppery writing, an almost recklessly bold imagination, audacious empathy, and a story so twisty and volatile that nearly every turn feels electrifyingly unexpected. This rough-n-tumble model of Southern literature-the vehicle of choice for the late greats Barry Hannah, Larry Brown, Harry Crews, and William Gay-has felt stalled on the roadside for several years now; Jamie Kornegay just pulled up with some big-ass jumper cables." -Jonathan Miles, author of Want Not and Dear American Airlines "Jamie Kornegay's novel Soil heralds the arrival of an exciting new voice. This book is atmospheric 'as all get-out,' as my grandmother might have said, and it crackles with intensity. It's everything I want a novel to be, a fine story well-told with characters I won't forget, set in a world so real you can smell it and taste it. Kornegay's something special." -Steve Yarbrough, author of The Realm of Last Chances "Mississippi has done it again, given us yet another brilliant writer. Welcome, Jamie Kornegay, to a long line of kick-ass storytellers. Soil is one of the most memorable novels I've read in years, with a killer story told in killer language. Highly, highly recommended." -Tom Franklin, author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter "Jamie Kornegay's prose is as rich and fertile as the Mississippi Delta landscape that spreads across the pages of Soil. It is poetic, both in its language and in the soulful complexity of its characters, all of them fallen and trudging along the hard worn path of redemption on dirty hands and knees." -Michael F. Smith, author of Rivers "Marked by wry humor, unforgettable characters, and riveting suspense, Jamie Kornegay's Soil is a spellbinding Greek tragedy played out against the backdrop of the choked river-bottoms, sprawling fields, and dusty roads of the Mississippi Delta. A brilliant, haunting portrait of the havoc one desperate man's decisions and dreams can wreak upon himself and those around him. This remarkable novel springs from rich earth indeed, and the end result is a book that will leave readers reeling." -Skip Horack, author of The Eden Hunter, and The Southern Cross "A darkly droll, epic novel told in a style I'd have to call a deceptively swift amble through a most vividly rendered, watery Delta world. Anyone from Coleridge to Twain to Faulkner to William Gay would have loved reading this book, and you will, too." -Brad Watson, author of The Heaven of Mercury and Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 10, 2015
• ISBN: 9781490672427

Jamie Kornegay

Jamie Kornegay lives in the Mississippi Delta, where he moved in 2006 to establish an independent bookstore, Turnrow Book Co. Before that he was a bookseller, events coordinator, and radio show producer at the famous Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi. He studied creative fiction under Barry Hannah at the University of Mississippi. Soil is his first novel.

Reviews for Soil

[zmagic69 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

A paranoid man + Global warming +Minor Flood = one incredibly, painfully boring book. It is books like this, that get a ton of press and praise, that turn people off from reading.

[rumuse · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

A debut novel in the best tradition of the literary Southern Gothic, this dark tragicomedy held me in a dreadful grip right to the end.

[brandiec-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

3.5 starsI just read a book called Judging a Book by Its Lover, in which Lauren Leto provides five-word slogans to summarize books by a variety of classic and contemporary authors. (My favorite: William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury = "Dilsey saved all their asses.") My five-word summary of Jamie Kornegay's Soil? Crime and Punishment in Mississippi.To be fair, Kornegay expects the comparison; at one point, we learn that our protagonist, Jay Mize, has "a dog-eared Dostoevsky" on his bookshelf. Unlike Raskolnikov, however, Jay hasn't actually killed anyone, so his building paranoia, lacking any grounding in a guilty conscience, appears to be the product of mental illness. Narratives about the mentally ill can be interesting, as Soil is, but they generally do not lead the reader to identify with or inhabit the skin of a character in the way that great literature does. At bottom, Soil doesn't ask anything of the reader; it is the reading equivalent of an episode of Hoarders.The reader's attempt to relate to Jay is further hampered by a massive sub-plot in which one of Jay's suspected pursuers, Sheriff's Deputy Danny Shoals, falls in lust with Jay's estranged wife Sandy. (The explanation for Shoals's vanity license plate, SUGAR, is particularly cringe-inducing.) While Shoals's pursuit of his wife does lend credence to Jay's advancing paranoia, Kornegay could have accomplished his purpose without all of the details about Shoals's sexual proclivities.At the beginning of the book, we are charmed by Jay's obsession with the soil, with his desire to create the best environment in which to grow food after what he sees as the coming environmental apocalypse. By the end, however, we are merely dispassionate observers of a crumbling mind.TRIGGER WARNING: Dogs were killed during the writing of this book.I received a free copy of Soil through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.