SOME GO HOME
By Odie Lindsey
W. W. Norton & Company, July 21, 2020
An Iraq war veteran turned small town homemaker, Colleen works hard to keep her deployment behind her―until pregnancy brings her buried trauma to the surface. She hides her mounting anxiety from her husband, Derby, who is in turn preoccupied with the media frenzy surrounding the long-overdue retrial of his father, Hare Hobbs, for a civil rights–era murder.
As Colleen and Derby prepare for the arrival of their twins, they must confront what it will mean to parent children in Pitchlynn, a town whose upscale marketing rebrand will reframe its antebellum estates . . . and erase any legacy of violence. And as the trial draws near, questions of Hare’s guilt only magnify these tensions of class and race, tied always to the land and who can call it their own.
Selected Praise
“Some Go Home is an extraordinary novel. It is lived-in in its particulars, told in energetic and evocative prose, and has as much insight into the peculiar ways the past informs the present as any book you're likely to encounter this year. But more than that, Odie Lindsey seems to have a notion about what all that might mean for where we're headed, and not just for those of us with some connection to the American South, but for any human being attempting to go forth in a world as strange as ours in a time as strange as this.”
- Kevin Powers, bestselling author of The Yellow Birds
“Some Go Home is both timely and timeless, its prose crackling and sparkling with energy and humor and characters who by the end are as real as the people next door. Terrific, just plain terrific.”
- Tom Franklin, New York Times bestselling author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter
“Some Go Home has the grit, power, and soul of Janis Joplin and the hardscrabble depth of Johnny Cash. Odie Lindsey brings Pitchlynn and North Mississippi to life better than anybody's business―you will recognize the landscape, the language, and the people as real... Some Go Home will have a long and happy life in the American mind. This novel is nothing short of thrilling.”
- Randall Kenan, author of A Visitation of Spirits
“Every now and then (and never as often as it should), Mississippi faces an accounting, and Odie Lindsey has shown up with receipts. Some Go Home reckons with blood ties, buried secrets, and the poisons of possession, reminding us that race and class sit inside each other, in permanent headlock. This is staccato realism; these sentences pop in the mouth like blackberries. ‘You needed lies to make memory,’ one character cautions. To make fiction you need truth, and Lindsey offers it here in crystalline quantity.”
- Katy Simpson Smith, author of The Story of Land and Sea
About the Author
Odie Lindsey is the author of We Come to Our Senses: Stories. He received an NEA-funded fellowship for veterans, holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is writer-in-residence at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.