Music of the Swamp

“This is not merely a stellar book. It is absolute ballad put to page.” —Southern Living

Lewis Nordan’s fiction invents its own world–always populated by madly heroic misfits. In Music of the Swamp, he focuses his magic and imagination on a boy’s utterly helpless love for his utterly hopeless father–a man who attracts bad luck like a magnet. Nordan evokes ten-year-old Sugar Mecklin’s world with dazzling clarity: the smells, the tastes, and most surely the sounds of life in this peculiar, somewhat bizarre, Delta town. Sugar discovers that what his daddy says is true: “The Delta is filled up with death”; but he also finds an endless supply of hope.

An ALA Notable Book
Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Fiction Award