Wiley Cash is following up his debut novel A Land More Kind Than Home with This Dark Road to Mercy, releasing in stores on January 28, 2014. Cash’s first book made the NY Times bestseller list and was on the Library Journal Top Ten list, and he’ll be on the road promoting the Morrow/Harper Collins release in the upcoming weeks. Stops on the PR tour include Maine, Florida, and Texas.
Cash, a Southern New Hampshire University’s MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction program teacher, set the new book in rural North Carolina (his home state) and used his experiences attending an evangelical church as part of the story for his new novel.
“I knew two sisters in our congregation who came to Gastonia out of the foster care system to live with their birth mother,” stated Cash. “But they weren’t very well looked after. The fifteen-year-old acquired a boyfriend who was 22, and the twelve-year-old was going with a guy who was 30.”
Cash recalls that the boyfriends were drug dealers who ultimately murdered the sisters. “I remember reading about that in the newspaper,” Cash said, “and being moved by how vulnerable those two girls were. All they had, really, was each other.”
Details on This Dark Road to Mercy:
In Cash’s new novel the sisters are younger, twelve and nine, and they don’t have boyfriends. But their drug-addled mother dies in bed one night, and the girls are placed in a foster home—until their long-vanished father, enriched by some money he shouldn’t have and with some tough customers on his trail, kidnaps them from that home.
Source: Morrow/Harper Collins
-Posted by Rebecca Murray
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