David Joy, Those We Thought We Knew

“David Joy is one of the best young writers around and this, his fifth novel, shows you why. Set in the NC mountains it follows his usual themes of disaffected youth, gentrification, and the supposed pluses of progress uprooting generations of families from the land that they grew up on. But with this one he ups the ante and brings in more contemporary issues that have been affecting us all these past few years like Black Lives Matter, Confederate statues, and everything else that comes with the collisions of past and present. It starts with the death of a young woman who’s visiting her grandmother for the summer and ends with her grandmother ruminating on all those she’s known over her long life in one of the most perfect endings Pete says he’s ever read in all his years of bookselling. This is more of a genre bending novel, as so many are these days, than a true mystery but it definitely belongs on the Beltie list.” — Pete Mock