One Simple Thing

(Paperback)

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Description

When his father leaves town, twelve-year-old Rodney Culver's mother takes up with Otis Dell, a fry cook at the local diner--and a well-known petty thief. While Rodney resists the man's influence at first, Otis soon draws the boy into his small-time criminal world. After a simple heist goes violently wrong, Rodney becomes an unwitting fugitive, swept away from his mother to the primitive mountain sanctuary of the mysterious Lester Fanning. But with Lester's skeptical lady friend in the way, and the town sheriff grappling with a curiously placed corpse, what once seemed like an easy plan quickly devolves into a knot of complications.

Reviews

"Read meticulously weaves the gritty, hard-knock lives of many men and women from this impoverished, rural town in mountainous Washington into 'tight little complicated knots.'...A moody, haunting foray into rural Americana in the mold of Daniel Woodrell and Christian Kiefer."--Kirkus Reviews

In this fine first novel, Read deftly portrays the competing feelings of suffocation and loneliness that can breed in small towns. Pair this with Daniel Woodrell's marvelous Tomato Red." --Booklist

Though set in a bleak place at a bleak time, Read's novel ultimately is one of hope. As it winds to its conclusion, each character finds a key to closing the self-created distance between who they are and who they'd like to be, culminating in an extraordinary Christmas Eve act of love. Most readers will enjoy."--Library Journal

A well-crafted, subtle psychological thriller. --Publisher's Weekly

A stunning display of grit made alluring. Both beautiful and stark, Ash Falls is a slice-of-life portrait that gives color to the grayest of times. --Shelf Awareness

Ash Falls is a dynamite debut: keenly observed, well-paced, and dripping with atmosphere. Read's gritty, hard-knock characters walk off the page.--Jonathan Evison, best-selling author of The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving and West of Here

"Warren Read's Ash Falls is one of those compelling novels that works into your awareness in layers until, almost without knowing it, you find yourself involved with a whole community of intersecting lives. This is sophisticated storytelling, quiet and unpredictable and gorgeous. Read creates characters with such precision and exactitude that the book has the quality of a Vermeer painting, of people captured in moments of their ordinary, miraculous, so-lit lives."--Kent Meyers, author of New York Times bestsellers The Work of Wolves and Twisted Tree.

"Warren Read spins an engrossing and eloquent narrative that sharpens our moral conscience through the power of a great story. Ash Falls is a gift of a book, and a delicious place to lose yourself in an immersing read."--Carol Cassella, best-selling author of Oxygen, Gemini and Healer

Author Bio

Warren Read is the author of a 2008 memoir, The Lyncher in Me, about his discovery that his great-grandfather had incited a lynching in 1920, and the 2017 novel, Ash Falls, which was called "a moody, haunting foray into rural Americana in the mold of Daniel Woodrell and Christian Kiefer," by Kirkus. His fiction has been published in Hot Metal Bridge, Mud Season Review, Sliver of Stone, Inklette, Switchback and The Drowning Gull. In addition, he has had two short plays directed and produced by Tony winner Dinah Manoff. Warren earned his MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University.