Product Description

When Henry McAllan moves his city-bred wife, Laura, to a cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta in 1946, she finds herself in a place both foreign and frightening. Henry's love of rural life is not shared by Laura, who struggles to raise their two young children in an isolated shotgun shack under the eye of her hateful, racist father-in-law. When it rains, the waters rise up and swallow the bridge to town, stranding the family in a sea of mud. As the Second World War shudders to an end, two young men return from Europe to help work the farm. Jamie McAllan is everything his older brother Henry is not and is sensitive to Laura's plight, but also haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eldest son of the black sharecroppers who live on the farm, comes home from war with the shine of a hero, only to face far more dangerous battles against the ingrained bigotry of his own countrymen. These two unlikely friends become players in a tragedy on the grandest scale.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3262 in Books
• Published on: 2008-10-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

From the Back Cover
WINNER OF THE BELLWETHER PRIZE FOR FICTION

‘A page-turning read’ Observer

When Henry McAllan moves his city-bred wife, Laura, to a cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta in 1946, she finds herself in a place both foreign and frightening. Henry’s love of rural life is not shared by Laura, who struggles to raise their two young children in an isolated shotgun shack under the eye of her hateful, racist father-in-law. When it rains, the waters rise up and swallow the bridge to town, stranding the family in a sea of mud.
As the Second World War shudders to an end, two young men return from Europe to help work the farm. Jamie McAllan is everything his older brother Henry is not and is sensitive to Laura’s plight, but also haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eldest son of the black sharecroppers who live on the farm, comes home from war with the shine of a hero, only to face far more dangerous battles against the ingrained bigotry of his own countrymen. These two unlikely friends become players in a tragedy on the grandest scale.
‘Jordan builds the tension slowly and meticulously, so that when the shocking denouement arrives, it is both inevitable and devastating…A compelling tale’ Glasgow Herald

About the Author
Hillary Jordan grew up in Texas and Oklahoma and received her MFA in fiction from Columbia University. Mudbound is her first novel.

Customer Reviews

Richard & Judy 100% right again
This book is really powerful. It's set in the Deep South of the USA just as World War Two has finished, where little had changed since the abolition of slavery. White and black farmers live side by side amidst terrible prejudice, yet the war has changed things, and terrible consequences follow. But there's also a lot of love, and family in the book. If you liked Cold Mountain I think this might be a good choice.

The story is incredibly dramatic. It's told by each character in turn, so you hear lots of different voices as the tale progresses. My hair was on end for much of the book and I cried at the ending, which is heart-wrenching. It is as vivid as a good film, but in addition, is beautifully written, with a really strong, muscular sense of the story and of the characters. Hillary Jordan makes a point of showing the goodness and the evil that are both in the world, and links the terrible events of the book to tiny chance decisions that could have gone either way. The ending is really brilliant too. I think Richard & Judy have picked some really good books and this is another one.

Sobering, shocking and beautifully written
This is one of those books I guess which will continue to resonate, and linger in the mind. Its particularly shocking as it forces us to remember how VERY recently the civil rights movement became something mainstream.

In the year when Americans elected Barack Obama to the White House, its so shocking to remember that only a few decades ago, in the most powerful nation on earth, apartheid was still the norm in some states, that the lynching mob was still in operation for black people who 'stepped out of line' (a line drawn by racists)

This story, set at the end of World War II, and dealing with the effects of that on the men who returned to the States from Europe, changed both by an expansion AND a loss of innocence, and also it is about the effect of family, both in its strengths and weaknesses.

The book is told through several different voices, and Jordan builds our sense of compassion, horror, pity, shame and disgust beautifully.

Her ending hints at, but doesn't guarantee, hope

A gifted debut
Early in the second chapter of Hillary Jordan's brilliant new novel Mudbound, one of her leading characters, Laura, says, "I suppose the beginning depends on who's telling the story. No doubt the others would start somewhere different, but they'd still wind up at the same place in the end." And this is the key to the book's whole structure. We have just seen the end. In Chapter One we saw Laura's husband and his younger brother digging a grave on their farm, a grave seven feet deep in what seems to have been total mud. They were burying their father, who did not, it is hinted, die from natural causes. How this end came about we are told in the following chapters, each of which is narrated by one of the others.
This is of course a structure similar to William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, but the comparison need not stop there. Hillary Jordan writes with the same slow-burning intensity and this area of the Mississippi Delta is struck by the same tragedies, the same storms - meteorological, emotional and racial - as any in Yoknapatawpha County.
Two young men have returned to the Delta from serving in World War Two: Laura's young brother-in-law and the son of one of the black share-cropping families who work on her husband's land. They have seen a different world and no longer fit in to this bigoted and racist community. They become friends. But the young black is seen to be riding in the passenger seat of his friend's pick-up truck instead of in the back where he belongs, and that is cause enough for all that follows. It is a violent and brutal story but told with understanding and compassion.
Mudbound won the Bellwether prize for fiction, a prize awarded biennially to a first literary novel that addresses issues of social justice. and I feel sure that there will be many more prizes won by this outstandingly gifted writer.
Neil Curry