Where The Dead Sit Talking

(Paperback)

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Set in rural Oklahoma during the late 1980s, Where the Dead Sit Talking is a startling, authentically voiced and lyrically written Native American coming-of-age story. 2018 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FICTION FINALIST Set in rural Oklahoma during the late 1980s, Where the Dead Sit Talking is a stunning and lyrical Native American coming-of-age story. With his single mother in jail, Sequoyah, a fifteen-year-old Cherokee boy, is placed in foster care with the Troutt family. Literally and figuratively scarred by his mother's years of substance abuse, Sequoyah keeps mostly to himself, living with his emotions pressed deep below the surface. At least until he meets seventeen-year-old Rosemary, a troubled artist who also lives with the family. Sequoyah and Rosemary bond over their shared Native American background and tumultuous paths through the foster care system, but as Sequoyah's feelings toward Rosemary deepen, the precariousness of their lives and the scars of their pasts threaten to undo them both.

Reviews

Finalist for the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction
Finalist for the 2019 SFC Literary Prize
Longlisted for the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award
Longlisted for the 2019 Aspen Words Literary Prize
NPR'sCode SwitchBest Books of 2018
A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2018
ASouthern LivingBest Book of 2018
2018 Reading the West Book Award Winner for Fiction
2019 In the Margins Book Award Top Fiction Novel

Praise for Where the Dead Sit Talking

Set in rural Oklahoma in the 1980s, Hobson's tale reverberates with the hope of connection as it explores Native displacement and loss.
The New York Times

An extraordinary book.
NPR'sCode Switch

Astrange and powerful Native American Bildungsroman . . . this novel breathes with a dark, pulsing life of its own.
The Tulsa Voice

Soulful.
Dallas Morning News

This is a dark story that depicts the loneliness and pain of unwanted children and the foster care system where they end up . . . authentic and humane.
The Oklahoman

A dark, twisting, emotional novel about a teenage Cherokee boy dislocated in the foster care system . . .The novel holds a difficult dialogue on intergenerational trauma, the effects of separating children from their Nations, and the perilous outcomes if we do not make urgent changes to the systems forcing American Indians to assimilate and disconnect. This may be set in the past, however, the same cycles exist today, showing that we have not yet learned the necessary lessons to interrupt the trauma.
Electric Literature

A powerful testament to one young Native Americans will to survive his lonely existence. Sequoyahs community and experience is one we all need to know, and Hobson delivers the young mans story in a deeply profound narrative.
KMUW Wichita Public Radio

I was really struck by the intelligence of the book, as well as the significance of the story that he's telling, about what it's like to be a modern Indigenous person in this country, as a Native American, and to be in the foster care system. I was very struck by the plot of itit's very well written, it's very propulsive, it's very readable for literary fiction, and I would recommend it heartily to book clubs.
Min Jin Lee, author ofPachinko

Imagine a plot hybrid of Dickens and George Saunders.
The Brooklyn Rail

Dreamlike prose . . . Where the Dead Sit Talkingis an exploration of whether its possible for a person to heal when all the world sees is a battlefield of scars.
San Diego CityBeat

The latest from Hobson is a smart, dark novel of adolescence, death, and rural secrets set in late-1980s Oklahoma. Hobsons narrative control is stunning, carrying the reader through scenes and timelines with verbal grace and sparse detail. Far more than a mere coming-of-age story, this is a remarkable and moving novel.
Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

A masterly tale of life and death, hopes and fears, secrets and lies.
Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

Hobson's eloquent prose and story line will keep literary and general fiction readers turning pages. Its teen protagonists offer interest for young adults.
Library Journal

[A] poignant and disturbing coming-of-age story . . . Hobson presents a painfully visceral drama about the overlooked lives of those struggling on the periphery of mainstream society.
Booklist

Hobson's gift to the reader is the hopeful persistence he instills in Sequoyah, despite his challenges with identity and belonging. He is a young man who is clearly scarred but thankfully not defeated.
Shelf Awareness

InWhere the Dead Sit Talking, Hobson is once again in fine form, delivering a lyrical, somewhat brutal, and very touching coming of age story set in rural Oklahoma in the late 1980s. At once elegant and straightforward, poetic and cold in a way that approximates noir . . . a beautifully written novel.
Vol. 1 Brooklyn

Intriguing . . . Hobson has written here a dark and arresting tale.
Literary Hub

Where the Dead Sit Talkingis a sensitive and searching exploration of a youth forged in turbulence, in the endless aftermath of displacement and loss. Sequoyahs voice is powerfully singularboth wounded and woundingand this novel is a thrilling confirmation of Brandon Hobsons immense gifts on the page.
Laura van den Berg, author ofFind Me

Weird and intimate, like Ottessa Moshfegh'sEileen,Where the Dead Sit Talkingtakes us to a strange, dangerous place normally kept hidden. From the opening hook, with the unhurried authority of a master, Brandon Hobson initiates the reader into the secret lives of lost and unwanted teenagers trying to survive in an uncaring world. Creepy, sad, yet queerly thrilling.
Stewart O'Nan, author ofThe Speed Queen

Where the Dead Sit Talkingis a tender and unflinching look at shell-shocked young lives as they try in the eddies of foster care to keep their heads above water. Hobson writes with a humane authority but without giving his characters any alibis. What we have instead is a careful look at what it means to be physically and psychically scarred, abandoned by parents, Native American in a white world, haunted by death, and on the verge of becoming an adult. A wonderful, harrowing novel.
Brian Evenson, author of The Open Curtain

I fear and ferociously admire everything Brandon Hobson creates. He is the only person who can describe the way an object becomes whole when we have enough time to look at it or the presence of a loved one in the air even after she is gone. In this heartbreaking and vital novel there is an unconfessable world of pain, desire, and longing. A careful oscillating dance around avoiding the pangs of abandonment and wanting to go through them all at once to get the suffering over with. Sequoyah, his scars, and eye makeup will leave you with wide eyes and a brimming heart.
Chiara Barzini, author of Things That Happened Before the Earthquake

One of those novels that comes around rarely in Native American letters, one that quietly changes everything.
Anomaly

Praise for Brandon Hobson

Restrained, dark, and strangely silent . . . If you've ever had a homecoming laced with sadness and longing, you'll relate to [Deep Ellum].
Ottessa Moshfegh,New York Timesbestselling author ofHomesick for Another World

[Deep Ellum] stands out as a miniature masterpiece of mood.
San Diego City Beat

Hobson has a remarkable ability to travel deep into a very dark place and come out plausibly on the side of light.
Dawn Raffel, Readers Digest

Hobson writes novels that are very bright and incredibly dark, surprisingly funny and wonderfully complex.
Vol. 1 Brooklyn

With Deep Ellum, Hobson establishes a city that is as lively as Twin Peaks, a Walden that offers little peace, no meditation, a reversal of transcendentalism.
Electric Literature

Author Bio

Brandon Hobson is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize, and his writing has appeared in such places asConjunctions,NOON, The Paris Review Daily, andThe Believer. He is the author ofDesolation of Avenues Untold,Deep Ellum, andThe Levitationist. Beginning Fall 2019 he will be an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at New Mexico State University. He is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation Tribe of Oklahoma.