Devil Is Fine

A biracial narrator is still reeling from a sudden tragedy when a letter arrives from an attorney. His estranged white grandfather has died and left him a plot of land. He drives several hours south to a beach town, planning to sell it at once and move on.

The land refuses to be a simple sale. Once he looks closely, he learns what lies beneath the dirt, and it complicates everything he expected. The property is a former plantation, handed down through the men on his white mother's side of the family. He is now its Black owner.

The book is a surreal, darkly funny novel in which real and imagined, past and present, and tragedy and humor keep slipping into one another. Fathers and sons form a recurring pairing, and the narrator's own grief runs alongside the history he has inherited.

The narrator arrives wanting only to leave with the money. What he does with the land, and with the family past attached to it, is the question the story follows. The tone is wry and raw, closer to satire than to straight realism.