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Start giftingLawless
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Learn moreBased on the true story of his grandfather and two granduncles, Matt Bondurant's novel is a gripping tale of brotherhood, greed, and murder. The Bondurant boys were a notorious gang of roughnecks and moonshiners who ran liquor through Franklin County during Prohibition and after. The brothers played a central role in a major conspiracy trial and its violent end. In 1935, Sherwood Anderson, working on a magazine story, finds himself driving along the dusty red roads trying to find the brothers and break the silence that shrouds Franklin County. In vivid, muscular prose, Matt Bondurant brings these men—their dark deeds, their long silences, their deep desires—to life. His understanding of the passion, violence, and desperation at the center of this world is both heartbreaking and magnificent.
Matt Bondurant’s latest novel, The Night Swimmer, was featured in the New York Times Book Review, Outside magazine, and the Daily Beast, among other outlets. His second novel, The Wettest County in the World, is an international bestseller and was made into the feature film Lawless, starring Shia Labeouf, Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, and Jessica Chastain. His first novel, The Third Translation, is also an international bestseller, translated into fourteen languages worldwide. Matt has published numerous short stories, poems, essays, and book reviews, as well as feature articles specializing in adventure and endurance athletic events. He currently lives in Oxford, Mississippi.
Erik Steele is a professional actor living in New York City, where he has worked both on and off Broadway and in film. He has toured with the prestigious Acting Company, performing Shakespeare and Sheridan in theaters from Atlanta to Anchorage. He holds an MFA in acting from New York University and a BA from Vassar College.
Reviews
“Bondurant is a nimble writer…The liveliness of his writer makes it hard for event he most lily-livered to look away…Bondurant’s prose is lyrical.”
“Part family history, part fiction, Matt Bondurant’s somber, engrossing novel, [Lawless], patches together the legend of his paternal grandfather and uncles, a fearsome trio of bootleggers in rural Prohibition-era Virginia. He’s wonderful at evoking historical atmosphere—the elaborate stills camouflaged in the woods, the music, the drunken gatherings that explode into shattering violence.”
“Descriptively gritty and emotionally resonant, novelist Bondurant dramatically projects the poverty and danger at the heart of the old-time bootlegging life.”
“Bondurant writes fiercely and passionately…We are aware from the first page that we are in the hands of a remarkable storyteller.”
“Bondurant endows his gritty story with all the puzzle-solving satisfactions of a mystery. It’s a gripping, relentless tale, delivered in no-nonsense prose.”
“Pull up a chair and settle in for this fascinating story…This work of fiction is beautifully crafted and eloquently performed…Erik Steele masterfully navigates vocal shifts and offers a genuine appreciation for the prose, which is vividly violent and sparklingly descriptive by turns.”
“A cracklingly good novel, with plenty of action and local color.”
“Whether fiction or biography, it succeeds in delivering a pungent slice of Americana, a portrait of a place and an era and a way of life that is part romantic, part viscerally violent, part metaphorical, all wrapped in a kind of rural poetry.”
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