Bastarda

Greenville County, South Carolina, is a wild, lush place, and the Boatwright family lives hard in it. The men drink heavily and shoot up one another's trucks. The women marry young and age fast.

Ruth Anne Boatwright, called Bone, is at the centre of the book. She is a South Carolina bastard, and her birth certificate carries annotations that tell part of her story. Bone watches everything around her with the sharp, unsparing eye of a child.

Her mother, Anney, depends on Bone's stepfather, Daddy Glen, and that need pulls Bone into a family triangle. Anney's loyalty to her daughter is tested by it. Glen is gentle with Bone at first, but he grows colder and angrier over time. He calls her cold as death, mean as a snake, and twice as twisty.

The novel follows that deterioration toward a final, harrowing encounter between Bone and Glen, after which nothing can go back to how it was. It is a family story told from a child's point of view, set in a rural Southern world of rough men and worn-down women, and it is a hard, unsentimental read.