The Tilted World

In 'The Tilted World' husband and wife authors Tom Franklin's (Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter) and Beth Ann Fennelly's (Great With Child) collaboration creates a story that swirls in the murky waters of moonshining and murder. It's 1927 in Hobnob, Mississippi, during the Great Flood, and Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover has sent federal revenue agents, Ted Ingersoll and Ham Johnson, to investigate the disappearance of two prohibition agents. On the way, Ingersoll and Ham come across a baby who is the sole survivor of a country-store robbery gone awry. Ingersoll, who is an orphan himself, can’t bring himself to leave the baby with a local agency. Instead he seeks out Dixie Clay, a 22-year-old mother who has recently buried her only child. Dixie Clay, along with her womanizing and abusive husband Jesses Holliver, is a bootlegger. To add to the plot, the Hollivers are possibly the last to have seen the missing revenuers. As the Mississippi waters begin to swell well beyond the banks, Dixie Clay and other residents grab what meager belongings they have and escape the eminent disaster and the adventures takes off.

The author’s voices are harmonious and the language poetic. Fennelly and Franklin convincingly describe a time and place where the landscape (as well as lives) was wildly off-kilter.