Kent Wascom's Books

The Great State of West Florida

A Novel

By: Kent Wascom

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The Great State of West Florida

A Novel

By: Kent Wascom

From the beloved author previously compared to Cormac McCarthy and Joyce Carol Oates (Washington Post), a startling and unconventional neon-pink Western of vengeance, family, and first love as two warring factions vie for control of a blood-soaked Gulf Coast It’s 2026, and Rally is thirteen years old. The long, hot Louisiana summer looms before him like a face-melting stretch of blacktop, and the country is talking civil war while his adoptive family acts more vicious than ever. Rally spends his days wondering about his dead father’s people, the Woolsacks of West Florida, who long ago led a failed rebellion to carve their own state from the swamp and sugar-sand of the coast. That family might have been his too—if his mother and a crew of vigilantes hadn’t tried to kill them all back when he was a baby. Rally lives in the shadow of guilt and in fear of the only other survivors: his uncle Rodney, now a professional gunfighter on the app DU3L, where would-be shooters square off in armed combat, and his mysterious cousin Destiny, whereabouts unknown, whose own violence brought the massacre to an end. When the Woolsacks’ legacy is co-opted by Troy Yarbrough, a far-right politician leading a movement to turn the Florida panhandle into a white Christian ethnostate, Rodney bursts into Rally’s life, taking him on a journey into the wild heart of West Florida, where they join forces with a woman known only as the Governor—part prophet, part machine, with her own blazing vision for West Florida. Soon Rally will learn what West Florida means to the Woolsacks, and the lengths they will go to protect it, all while he falls for the machine-gun-toting, ATV-riding girl next door. An explosive, genre-redefining take on family, violence, and the costs of preserving a legacy in a sun-soaked world of megachurch magnates, suburban guerillas, and robotic warriors, The Great State of West Florida is also the tender coming-of-age story of a young man caught in the wheels of something bigger than he knows.

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Page Count

187

Publisher

Grove Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0802162851

ISBN 13

9780802162854

The Blood of Heaven

A Novel

By: Kent Wascom

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The Blood of Heaven

A Novel

By: Kent Wascom

“The work of a young writer with tremendous ambition, a bildungsroman of religion and revolution set during an obscure chapter of American history.” —The Washington Post A powerful and impressive debut novel from the winner of the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival Prize for fiction—first in the Woolsack family saga that continues with Secessia and The New Inheritors. The Blood of Heaven is the story of Angel Woolsack, a preacher’s son, who flees the hardscrabble life of his itinerant father, falls in with a charismatic highwayman, then settles with his adopted brothers on the rough frontier of West Florida, where American settlers are carving their place out of lands held by the Spaniards and the French. The novel moves from the bordellos of Natchez, where Angel meets his love Red Kate to the Mississippi River plantations, where the brutal system of slave labor is creating fantastic wealth along with terrible suffering, and finally to the back rooms of New Orleans among schemers, dreamers, and would-be revolutionaries plotting to break away from the young United States and create a new country under the leadership of the renegade founding father Aaron Burr. The Blood of Heaven is a remarkable portrait of a young man seizing his place in a violent new world, a moving love story, and a vivid tale of ambition and political machinations that brilliantly captures the energy and wildness of a young America where anything was possible. It is a startling debut. “Wascom is a craftsman, and each of his lengthy, winding sentences shimmers with the tang of blood and bone and sweat, and the archaic splendor of his language.” —The Boston Globe

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Page Count

465

Publisher

Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Published Date

ISBN 10

0802193501

ISBN 13

9780802193506

The New Inheritors

A Novel

By: Kent Wascom

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The New Inheritors

A Novel

By: Kent Wascom

The acclaimed author of The Blood of Heaven and Secessia “delivers a lyrical, emotionally charged study of life along the Gulf Coast a century past” (Kirkus Reviews). In 1914, with the world on the brink of war, Isaac, a nature-loving artist whose past is mysterious to all, including himself, meets Kemper, a defiant heiress caught in the rivalry between her brothers. Kemper’s older brother Angel is hiding a terrible secret about his sexuality, and her younger brother Red possesses a capacity for violence that frightens even the members of his own brutal family. Together Isaac and Kemper build a refuge on their beloved, wild, Gulf Coast. But their paradise is short-lived; as the coast is rocked by the storms of summer, the country is gripped by the furor preceding World War I, and the Woolsack family’s rivalries come to a bloody head. From the breathtaking beauty of the Gulf to the bloody havoc wreaked by the United States in Latin America, The New Inheritors explores the beauty and burden of what is handed down to us all. At once a love story and a family drama, a novel of nature and a novel of war, The New Inheritors traces a family whose life is intimately tied to the Gulf, that most disputed, threatened, and haunted part of this country we call America. “One of the darkest, most compelling writerly imaginations around.”—New Orleans Advocate “The third mesmerizing historical novel by Kent Wascom . . . His style and subjects echo great Southern writers like William Faulkner and Harry Crews, continuing a tradition of recounting terrible things in deliriously beautiful language.”—Tampa Bay Times

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Page Count

244

Publisher

Grove Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0802165699

ISBN 13

9780802165695

Secessia

A Novel

By: Kent Wascom

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Secessia

A Novel

By: Kent Wascom

The acclaimed author of The Blood of Heaven shares “a vivid portrait of 1862 New Orleans” as Union soldiers take over in this panoramic Civil War novel (Ron Charles, Washington Post). The largest city in the ill-starred confederacy has fallen under the soon-to-be-infamous General Benjamin “the Beast” Butler. And when twelve-year-old Joseph Woolsack disappears from his home, he draws his mother, Elise—a mixed-race woman passing for white—into a dark new world. Joseph grapples with his father’s legacy of violence and his own growing sentiment for Cuban exile Marina Fandal, the only survivor of a shipwreck that claimed the lives of her parents. Meanwhile, Elise struggles to keep hold of her sanity, her son and her own precarious station. But she soon encounters a troubling figure from her past, a man who is deeply mired in the intrigue surrounding the city’s occupation. Alternating between the perspectives of five characters, Secessia weaves a tapestry of ravenous greed and malformed love, of slavery and desperation, set within the baroque melting-pot that is New Orleans. A Gothic tableaux vivant of epic scope and intimate horror, Secessia is the netherworld reflection of the conflict between north and south.

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Page Count

373

Publisher

Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Published Date

ISBN 10

0802191339

ISBN 13

9780802191335

The Blood of Heaven

A Novel

By: Kent Wascom

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The Blood of Heaven

A Novel

By: Kent Wascom

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Page Count

465

Publisher

Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Published Date

ISBN 10

0802193501

ISBN 13

9780802193506

Secessia

A Novel

By: Kent Wascom

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Secessia

A Novel

By: Kent Wascom

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Page Count

373

Publisher

Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Published Date

ISBN 10

0802191339

ISBN 13

9780802191335

Book's by Kent Wascom

The Great State of West Florida

The Great State of West Florida

The Blood of Heaven

The Blood of Heaven

The New Inheritors

The New Inheritors

Secessia

Secessia

The Blood of Heaven

The Blood of Heaven

Secessia

Secessia

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