Lawless

White mule, white lightning, firewater, popskull, wild cat, stump whiskey, or rotgut - whatever you called it, Franklin County was awash in moonshine in the 1920s. During Prohibition, the Bondurant Boys were moonshiners and notorious roughnecks who ran liquor though Franklin County, Virginia. Lawless is their story, a white-knuckle fable of bootlegging, revenge and remorse.

Forrest, the eldest brother, is fierce, mythically indestructible, and the consummate businessman; Howard, the middle brother, is an ox of a man besieged by the horrors he witnessed in the Great War; and Jack, the youngest, has a taste for luxury and a dream to get out of Franklin. Driven and haunted, these men forge a business, fall in love, and struggle to stay afloat as they watch the world they know crumble around them. In vivid, muscular prose, Matt Bondurant brings these men - their dark deeds, their long silences and their deep desires - to thrilling life.

“Engrossing.”

Thick with the kind of blood-soaked descriptions that would do Cormac McCarthy proud. Wall Street Journal There is blood. There is whiskey. There is the scent of gunpowder and gasoline hanging above the space through which the Bondurants pass, unrepentant, robed in their own greed. It's a dark, flinty reimagination of what a memoir - and your grandfather's stories - can be. Esquire Entertainment Weekly This is a lyrical and riveting book ... It's a book that hurts like life. Salon.com

Matt Bondurant's novel The Wettest County in the World was a New York Times Editor's Pick, and San Francisco Chronicle Best 50 Books of the Year. A former John Gardner Fellow in Fiction at Bread Loaf, Kingsbury Fellow at Florida State, and Walter E. Dakin Fellow at Sewanee, Matt's short fiction has been published in journals such as Prairie Schooner, The New England Review, and Glimmer Train, and he has recently held residencies at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. He currently lives in Texas.

A film tie-in edition and a gripping tale of brotherhood, greed and murder in a Prohibition county. White mule, white lightning, firewater, popskull, wild cat, stump whiskey, or rotgut - whatever you called it, Franklin County was awash in moonshine in the 1920s. During Prohibition, the Bondurant Boys were moonshiners and notorious roughnecks who ran liquor though Franklin County, Virginia. Lawless is their story, a white-knuckle fable of bootlegging, revenge and remorse. Forrest, the eldest brother, is fierce, mythically indestructible, and the consummate businessman; Howard, the middle brother, is an ox of a man besieged by the horrors he witnessed in the Great War; and Jack, the youngest, has a taste for luxury and a dream to get out of Franklin. Driven and haunted, these men forge a business, fall in love, and struggle to stay afloat as they watch the world they know crumble around them. In vivid, muscular prose, Matt Bondurant brings these men - their dark deeds, their long silences and their deep desires - to thrilling life.

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