Holly Goddard Jones Livres

Une fille bien est un de ces livres qui nous plongent d'emblee dans un univers bien particulier. Celui-ci a pour cadre le Kentucky, entre Midwest et Sud profond, et Roma, une petite ville paisible des Etats-Unis. Paisible en apparence seulement car, sous la surface lisse du quotidien, en embuscade, sommeillent l'adolescence, l'amour, la mort, la trahison, les choix parfois cruels, la violence physique ou morale.... Tout ce qui fait qu'une vie tranquille ou ennuyeuse un jour peut basculer. Une fille bien est un recueil de huit nouvelles - huit histoires ou tranches de vie - dans lesquelles Holly Goddard Jones raconte, avec une formidable empathie, le risque inherent a toute existence, cet instant imprevisible ou la banalite rencontre la tragedie. Un premier livre sensible et lumineux.

2022 The Story Prize LonglistA harried and depressed mother of three young children serves on a committee that watches over the bottomless sinkhole that has appeared in her Kentucky town. During COVID lockdown, a thirty-four-year-old gamer moves back home with his parents and is revisited by his long-forgotten childhood imaginary friend. A politician running for a state congressional seat and a young mother, who share the same set of fears about the future, cross paths but don’t fully understand one another. A woman attends a party at the home of a fellow church parishioner and discovers she is on the receiving end of a sales pitch for a doomsday prepper.These stories and more contemplate our current reality with both frankness and hard-earned hopefulness, realism and fabulism, tackling parenthood, environment, and the absurd-but-unavoidable daily toil of worrying about mundane matters when we’ve entered “an era of unknowability, of persistent strangeness.” 

Exploring the complexities of morality, the narrative delves into the lives of small-town Southerners grappling with their desires to be virtuous amidst uncertainty. Through rich character development, the story reveals the struggles and contradictions inherent in the pursuit of goodness, providing a poignant look at human nature and community dynamics.

Set against a dystopian backdrop, the narrative follows a group of thrill-seekers who engage in the dangerous act of jumping "the salt line." Through their harrowing experiences, the story explores themes of survival and the essence of humanity. Award-winning novelist Holly Goddard Jones weaves a gripping tale that combines literary depth with the excitement of adventure, reminiscent of works like Station Eleven and California.

A brilliantly nuanced, psychologically astute crime debut that explores the fault-lines of a small community - their hidden desires and their other, secret selves.