There was no rising from the dead and there was no hand to calm the storms and there was no peace in no valley.

In the hurricane-ravaged bottomlands of South Mississippi, where stores are closing and jobs are few, a fierce zealot has gained a foothold, capitalising on the vulnerability of a dwindling population and a burning need for hope. As she preaches and promises salvation from the light of the pulpit, in the shadows she sows the seeds of violence.

Elsewhere, Jessie and her toddler, Jace, are on the run across the Mississippi/Louisiana line, in a resentful return to her childhood home and her desolate father. Holt, Jace's father, is missing and hunted by a brutish crowd, and an old man witnesses the wrong thing in the depths of night. In only a matter of days, all of their lives will collide, and be altered, in the maelstrom of the changing world.

At once elegiac and profound, Salvage This World journeys into the heart of a region growing darker and less forgiving, and asks how we keep going - what do we hold onto - in a land where God has fled.

Praise for Michael Farris Smith

'Smith is emerging as one of the great chroniclers of America's dispossessed' - Mail on Sunday on Blackwood

'Smith depicts a steamy American South redolent of lawless menace in sparse, simple, lyrical prose... You will not be disappointed' - Daily Mail on Desperation Road

'If you're a fan of Southern or Rural Noir - James Lee Burke, Daniel Woodrell, Donald Ray Pollock, the literary children of Flannery O'Connor - you'll feel uncomfortably at home' - Times on Blackwood

'Gripping... the novel rings fiercely true' - Financial Times on NICK

'Vividly imagined and suffused with pulsing narrative energy and an assured, atmospheric sense of period setting and speech' - Irish Times on NICK

'Vivid, visual, strong, poetic' - Herald on NICK