Brandon Hobson Knihy

Steeped in Cherokee myths and history, a novel about a fractured family reckoning with the tragic death of their son long ago—from National Book Award finalist Brandon Hobson In the fifteen years since their teenage son, Ray-Ray, was killed in a police shooting, the Echota family has been suspended in private grief. The mother, Maria, increasingly struggles to manage the onset of Alzheimer’s in her husband, Ernest. Their adult daughter, Sonja, leads a life of solitude, punctuated only by spells of dizzying romantic obsession. And their son, Edgar, fled home long ago, turning to drugs to mute his feelings of alienation. With the family’s annual bonfire approaching—an occasion marking both the Cherokee National Holiday and Ray-Ray’s death, and a rare moment in which they openly talk about his memory—Maria attempts to call the family together from their physical and emotional distances once more. But as the bonfire draws near, each of them feels a strange blurring of the boundary between normal life and the spirit world. Maria and Ernest take in a foster child who seems to almost miraculously keep Ernest’s mental fog at bay. Sonja becomes dangerously fixated on a man named Vin, despite—or perhaps because of—his ties to tragedy in her lifetime and lifetimes before. And in the wake of a suicide attempt, Edgar finds himself in the mysterious Darkening Land: a place between the living and the dead, where old atrocities echo. Drawing deeply on Cherokee folklore, The Removed seamlessly blends the real and spiritual to excavate the deep reverberations of trauma—a meditation on family, grief, home, and the power of stories on both a personal and ancestral level.

From National Book Award finalist Brandon Hobson, a kaleidoscopic middle-grade adventure that mixes the realism of a Cherokee boy's life with the magic of Cherokee lore Ziggy has ANXIETY. Partly this is because of the way his mind works, and how overwhelmed he can get when other people (especially his classmate Alice) are in the room. And partly it's because his mother disappeared when he was very young, making her one of many Indigenous women who've gone mysteriously missing in recent times. Ziggy and his sister Moon want answers, but nobody around can give them. Once Ziggy gets it in his head that answers may be found in a nearby cave, there's no going back. Along with Moon, Alice, and his best friend Corso, he sets out on a mind-bending adventure. His story is tied to all of the stories of the Cherokee that have come before him... and his searching may lead him to Nunnehi, wise and playful spirits who help Cherokees in need. Ziggy might not have any control over the past... but if he learns the lessons of the storyteller, he may be able to better shape the future... by shaping how the past is told.