Meet Nikki, the most determined young woman in the North Carolina hills. Determined not to let deadbeats and dropouts set her future. Determined to use whatever tools she can get her hands on to shape the world to her will. Determined to preserve her family’s domination of the local drug trade. Nikki is thirteen years old.
     Opening with a deadly plunge from a high cliff into a tiny swimming hole, Young God refuses to slow down for a moment as it charts Nikki’s battles against isolation and victimhood. Nikki may be young, but she's a fast learner, and soon—perhaps too soon, if in fact it's not too late—she knows exactly how to wield her powers over the people around her. The only thing slowing her down is the inheritance she's been promised but can't seem to find, buried somewhere deep in those hills and always just out of reach. 
     With prose stripped down to its bare essence, brash and electrifying, brutal yet starkly beautiful, Katherine Faw Morris's Young God is a debut that demands your attention and won't be forgotten—just like Nikki, who will cut you if you let that attention waver.

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, May 2014: Katherine Faw Morris's voice is terse and vicious, and in her debut Young God, she shows that she can strong arm the reader with few words. Thirteen-year-old Nikki has spent her life in the Carolina hills, a bleak world of drugs, prostitution, and murder. Morris borrows the grit and violence of modern Southern Gothic authors, like Ron Rash or Daniel Woodrell, but her own strengths come from a sense of restraint. Each of Young God's short chapters captures a single breathless moment. Miles Davis famously said, "It's not the notes you play; it's the notes you don't play." With the text Morris spares--in the whitespace of her novel--lay the most terrifying revelations. It turns out the most resonant words of Young God are the ones alluded to, never spoken. --Kevin Nguyen

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