Birmingham, 35 Miles

By James Braziel

In this haunting and poignant debut novel, James Braziel tells an unforgettable story of love, family, and survival across a world that has already begun to die.…

When the ozone layer opened and the sun relentlessly scorched the land, there was nothing left but to hope. Mathew Harrison had always heard of a better life as close as Birmingham, only thirty-five miles away—zones of blue sky, wet grass, and clean breathable air. But to him it’s a myth, a place guarded by soldiers, off limits to all but the lucky few. Meanwhile Mat works alongside his father, mining only the red clay that the once fertile Alabama soil can offer.

Now, with the killing deserts on the move again and the woman he loves on a Greyhound heading north, Mat has a travel visa and every reason to leave. But his roots in this lifeless soil inexplicably hold him firmly to the past. Torn between hope and resignation, with time running out, Mat must make a fateful choice between a new life and the one that isn’t ready to let him go.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Feb 26, 2008
• ISBN: 9780553904710

James Braziel

James Braziel grew up in South Georgia on his father's farm. They had cattle, peanut and melon crops, and pines for cutting for pulpwood. Days were for working, nights for walking the dirt road that split the land. In winter, the sky. His writing comes from the humid air, the sand-grit of that place.James' collection of stories, This Ditch-Walking Love, winner of the Tartt First Fiction Prize, is set in the Murphrees Valley section of the Cumberland Plateau where he now lives, where ridges lift above what creeks and small rivers have made. Because the characters in these stories don't have enough money to carry them, they rely on a network of plateau fields, creeks, woods, and clay roads. It might be enough, a field row in August for walking and gathering tomatoes and okra up, or a bluff for jumping off of into the Locust Fork River, or a drive out to Jick's Chevrolet just to see his hellfire cars. These are the places everyone goes to, looking for what they can't make full on their own.

Reviews for Birmingham, 35 Miles

[dystopos · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The story jumps back and forth over the life of the protagonist, Mathew Harrison. He is born in 2014, the year that dust storms sweep across the Gulf South, rendering it a desert wasteland, cut off from the "saved world" in Birmingham and beyond. He faces a crisis during his 30th year when his conceptions of loyalty and hope are both quickly unraveling.Nicknamed "daydreamer", the protagonist has evocative visions of the past. They once gave him a taste of freedom and beauty, but become more and more a source of distraction and torment. Similarly the reader is bounced from scene to scene and can easily become disoriented as Braziel toils to explicate Harrison's personal mythology without indulging in much plot development.The reader is rewarded, ultimately, for working through the first half of the book as he or she can better get into Harrison's mind and appreciate his crisis -- one which remains mysterious even to his friends and family. Having reached that foothold, however, it is unfortunate that Braziel withholds any kind of real payoff as the ending is inconclusive. Appropriate, perhaps, but unsatisfying.