Stay and Fight
A Novel
A wildly original, piercingly timely addition to the story of the American family
Helen arrives in Appalachian Ohio full of love and her boyfriend’s ideas for living off the land. Too soon, with winter coming, he calls it quits. Helped by Rudy—her government-questioning, wisdom-spouting, seasonal-affective-disordered boss—and a neighbor couple, Helen makes it to spring. Those neighbors, Karen and Lily, are awaiting the arrival of their first child, a boy, which means their time at the Women’s Land Trust must end.
So Helen invites the new family to throw in with her—they’ll split the work and the food, build a house, and make a life that sustains them, if barely, for years. Then young Perley decides he wants to go to school. And Rudy sets up a fruit-tree nursery on the pipeline easement edging their land. The outside world is brought clamoring into their makeshift family.
Set in a region known for its independent spirit, Stay and Fight shakes up what it means to be a family, to live well, to make peace with nature and make deals with the system. It is a protest novel that challenges our notions of effective action. It is a family novel that refuses to limit the term. And it is a marvel of storytelling that both breaks with tradition and celebrates it. Best of all, it is full of flawed, cantankerous, flesh-and-blood characters who remind us that conflict isn't the end of love, but the real beginning.
Absorbingly spun, perfectly voiced, and disruptively political, Madeline ffitch's Stay and Fight forces us to reimagine an Appalachia—and an America—we think we know. And it takes us, laughing and fighting, into a new understanding of what it means to love and to be free.
Loved by our collective!
An anthem for queer survival in a world so desperate to deny it, Stay and Fight is a celebration of what it means to be alive, flawed, and human. With a rotating cast of first-person narrators, Madeline Ffitch writes distinct voices that create a detailed snapshot of living off the land and working to make ends meet in rural small-town Appalachia. Honest, raw, quirky, harsh, stubborn, fun loving, heartbreaking, and gut-wrenching, I absolutely fell in love with the authenticity of these characters and their struggle to understand themselves, their commitment to one another, and what it looks like to build home together.
Product Details
- Hardcover
- 304 pages
- ISBN
- 9780374268121
- Publisher
- Farrar, Straus and Giroux (7/9/19)
- Dimensions
- 6.1 x 1.1 x 9.2 inches
- Tags
Tags
domestic fiction, indie next