Sent to a mysterious unnamed city in Soviet Russia, former nuclear specialist Valery Kolkhanov must serve out his prison sentence studying the effect of radiation on local animals and struggles to find answers about what is being hidden from the thousands who live in the town.

A searing and profound Southern odyssey by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward. In Jesmyn Ward's first novel since her National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. Drawing on Morrison and Faulkner, The Odyssey and the Old Testament, Ward gives us an epochal story, a journey through Mississippi's past and present that is both an intimate portrait...