“In luminous prose and with a powerful sense of drama, Mary Desjarlais brings us a new kind of hero in the person of Dorie LaValle who has the grit and brains to survive both the challenges of Prohibition as a moonshiner and the impossible odds of finding her way through the backroads of the human heart. DesJarlais is a gifted storyteller, one who makes you lose yourself in a tale so fascinating you stay up all night reading and call in sick the next day, unable to forget the wonderful, heady mixture of beauty, humor, and brutal reality that saturate these pages. This novel announces Mary DesJarlais as a bright star rising in the literary landscape. It will move, disturb, and haunt you in the best way with its poetic intensity, its originality and its tough, no holds barred characters.” – Jonis Agee, author of The River Wife