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Ohio University Press · Swallow Press · www.ohioswallow.com

Fiction

Fiction Book List

Forthcoming

Cover of 'The Woman at Otowi Crossing'

The Woman at Otowi Crossing
By Frank Waters

This is the story of Helen Chalmer, a person in tune with her adopted environment and her neighbors in the nearby Indian pueblo and also a friend of the first atomic scientists. The secret evolution of atomic research is a counterpoint to her psychic development.

Cover of 'The Man Who Killed the Deer'

The Man Who Killed the Deer
A Novel of Pueblo Indian Life
By Frank Waters

The story of Martiniano, the man who killed the deer, is a timeless story of Pueblo Indian sin and redemption, and of the conflict between Indian and white laws; written with a poetically charged beauty of style, a purity of conception, and a thorough understanding of Native American values.

Cover of 'People of the Valley'

People of the Valley
A Novel
By Frank Waters

One of Frank Waters’s most popular novels, People of the Valley takes place high in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains where an isolated Spanish-speaking people confront a threatening world of change.

Available

Cover of 'Allegiance'

Allegiance
Stories
By Gurney Norman

Spanning forty years of work, Allegiance is an autobiography told through stories—a rich personal journey into Norman’s life, place, and consciousness. In classic short stories, lyrical meditations, folktales, dreamscapes, and stream of consciousness writing, Norman imaginatively weaves together the threads of his life.

Cover of 'Fine Boys'

Fine Boys
A Novel
By Eghosa Imasuen

Set in Nigeria during the pro-democracy movement and told from the perspective of an eighteen-year-old Gen-Xer, Ewaen, this coming-of-age novel examines the violent university confraternities during the mid-1990s.

Cover of 'Allegiance'

Allegiance
Stories
By Gurney Norman

Spanning forty years of work, Allegiance is an autobiography told through stories—a rich personal journey into Norman’s life, place, and consciousness. In classic short stories, lyrical meditations, folktales, dreamscapes, and stream of consciousness writing, Norman imaginatively weaves together the threads of his life.

Cover of 'Allegiance'

Allegiance
Stories
By Gurney Norman

Spanning forty years of work, Allegiance is an autobiography told through stories—a rich personal journey into Norman’s life, place, and consciousness. In classic short stories, lyrical meditations, folktales, dreamscapes, and stream of consciousness writing, Norman imaginatively weaves together the threads of his life.

Cover of 'The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga'

The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga
By Mohamedou Ould Slahi and Larry Siems

This stirring, poetic tale features a Bedouin man whose irrepressible love for his family, his camels, and his way of life fuels his harrowing journey into the Sahara Desert to find a lost camel and his struggle to preserve a culture on the brink of profound change.

Cover of 'Familiarity Is the Kingdom of the Lost'

Familiarity Is the Kingdom of the Lost
By Dugmore Boetie
· Edited by Vusumuzi R. Kumalo and Benjamin N. Lawrance
· Introduction by Benjamin N. Lawrance and Vusumuzi R. Kumalo
· Foreword by Nadine Gordimer
· Afterword by Barney Simon

This fictionalized, first-person biography tells how a cunning rogue with nothing to lose relies on his guts and wits to survive amid racism and injustice in apartheid South Africa.

Selected as a Fall 2020 Okra Pick by the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) · Finalist for the 2020 Foreword Indies Awards (Adult Fiction – Thriller & Suspense) · Finalist for the 2020 Weatherford Award for best books about Appalachia · Winner of the 2021 Independent Publishers "IPPY" for Best Regional Fiction – South
Cover of 'How Fire Runs'

How Fire Runs
A Novel
By Charles Dodd White

Set in rural Appalachia and told through the voices of three different present-day narrators, this harrowing novel about white supremacists attempting to take over a small town focuses an unflinching eye on America’s ongoing, fraught relationship with racial and political injustice.

Selected for the Women's National Book Association's Great Group Reads program. · Longlisted for the 2021 PEN/Hemingway Award for Best Debut Novel · Winner of the 2022 Writers Conference of Northern Appalachia (WCoNA) Book of the Year
Cover of 'Goshen Road'

Goshen Road
A Novel
By Bonnie Proudfoot

Set from the late 1960s through the early 1990s, this elegiac, unvarnished, and empathetic novel captures one working-class family in rural West Virginia as they balance on the dividing line between Appalachia old and new, with sisters Dessie and Billie Price as its urgently beating heart.

Cover of 'Collages'

Collages
By Anaïs Nin
· Introduction by Anita Jarczok

First published in 1964 and now reissued with a new introduction by Anita Jarczok, Collages showcases Nin’s dreamlike and introspective style and psychological acuity. Seen by some as linked vignettes and some as a novel, the book is a mood piece that resists categorization.

Cover of 'Not Out of Hate'

Not Out of Hate
A Novel of Burma
By Ma Ma Lay
· Edited by William H. Frederick
· Translation by Margaret Aung-Thwin
· Introduction by Anna Allott
· Afterword by Robert E. Vore

Ma Ma Lay’s 1955 novel of the marriage between a rural teenager to a powerful Anglophile twenty years her senior, set in prewar Burma, is an engaging drama, finely observed work of social realism, and stirring rejection of Western cultural dominance by Burma’s foremost female author and one of its preeminent voices for change.

Cover of 'Brides in the Sky'

Brides in the Sky
Stories and a Novella
By Cary Holladay

Each of the crystalline worlds Cary Holladay brings us in the short stories and novella that make up Brides in the Sky has sisterhood, in all its urgency and peril, at its heart. She crafts these stories with subtle humor, a stunning sense of place, and an unerring eye for character.

2018 Weatherford Award Finalist · Finalist, 2018 Library of Virginia Literary Awards  · Winner, 2017 Appalachian Book of the Year (Fiction)
Cover of 'Fire Is Your Water'

Fire Is Your Water
A Novel
By Jim Minick

At age twenty, Ada’s reputation as a faith healer defines her in her rural Pennsylvania community. But on the day in 1953 that her family’s barn is consumed by flame, her identity is upended: for the first time, she fears death and doubts God. Fire Is Your Water, acclaimed memoirist Jim Minick’s first novel, builds on magical realism and social observation to offer an insider’s glimpse into the culture of Appalachia.

Cover of 'The Wolf at Number 4'

The Wolf at Number 4
A Novel
By Ayo Tamakloe-Garr

When Desire Mensah, a disgraced school teacher in her thirties, meets Wolfgang “Wolf” Ofori, an eleven-year-old genius, a strange friendship develops between them. Set in 1990s Ghana, The Wolf at Number 4 is a chilling and funny gothic tale that forces us to confront whether the wolves around us are born or made.

Selected as a Southern Independent Bookseller Association “Okra Pick.” · Finalist, 2019 Weatherford Award in Fiction · 2019 Library of Virginia Literary Awards Finalist (Fiction)
Cover of 'Yellow Stonefly'

Yellow Stonefly
A Novel
By Tim Poland

Haunted by her past and the deaths that marked it, Sandy Holston wields her fly rod with uncanny accuracy as her life plays out along a tight line between herself and a fish on the other end. In this rare fly fishing novel with a female protagonist, Tim Poland weaves suspense and introspection into an unforgettable read.

2018 Appalachian Book of the Year, Appalachian Writers Association
Cover of 'In the House of Wilderness'

In the House of Wilderness
A Novel
By Charles Dodd White

After months of wandering homeless through the landscape of Appalachia, a young woman named Rain finds herself part of a desperate family driven by exploitation and abuse. A harrowing story of choice and sacrifice, In the House of Wilderness is a novel about the modern South and how we fight through hardship and grief to find a way home.