The Kept

How far would you go for your family, for love, for survival, for revenge? A debut novel of big skies, deep snow, and open wounds. HOW FAR WOULD YOU GO FOR YOUR FAMILY, FOR LOVE, FOR REVENGE? 'Dark and mysterious ... reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy ... Sparse, elegant ... haunting.' New York Times In the winter of 1897, Elspeth Howell returns home to her isolated farmstead to find her family brutally murdered. Only her twelve-year-old son, Caleb, survives. Mother and son set out into the frozen wilderness to track down the men responsible for this horrific crime. Their search takes them to the ice-locked shores of Lake Erie, and a merciless town where violence abounds. As Caleb is forced into a brutal adulthood, he begins to uncover truths about his family he could never have anticipated, while Elspeth must confront secrets she has long kept hidden. Together, they discover the bond between mother and son may be their only hope for redemption.

About the Author :
James Scott has published short fiction in American literary reviews and journals, including Ploughshares, One Story, American Short Fiction and Post Road, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best New American Voices. He writes for the music magazine Under the Radar, is an issue editor at One Story, and teaches at Grub Street in Boston. The Kept is his first novel and has been longlisted for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. He lives in western Massachusetts, America.

Review :
A classily written crime novel that is also an atmospheric evocation of a bygone era. Darkly beautiful... The Kept is a rare blend of brutality and empathy, emotion and close observation. I thought at times of Cormac McCarthy's work and of the novels of David Vann. At other times it brought to mind Stef Penney's The Tenderness Of Wolves and Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain. But there's something wonderfully distinctive about The Kept... A literary page-turner of the highest calibre by a writer of serious talent. Mysterious and compelling... James Scott has written a riveting and memorable debut novel. With its vivid sense of time and place, lyrical writing, and complex questions of what constitutes a family, The Kept is an outstanding debut by a bright new voice in fiction. Winter and discontent... Scott is the master of mood... Haunting' Dark and mysterious… A novel whose daring is found in its bleakness… The plot unfolds with a weighty languor reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy… Sparse, elegant… haunting. Reads with the stark clarity of a Johnny Cash song Feels like the shell of a Cormac McCarthy novel filled with the intricate yearning and familial strife of a Lorca play… A gripping combination I don’t think we’re likely to find anywhere else. Dark and brutal… Never lets up until the climactic scene, in prose that’s brooding and intense right up until the final paragraph… So packed with incident and character, and so fluidly paced, that it’s brought vividly to life by Scott’s meticulous control Scott is [a] master storyteller in this outstanding debut