The Removed

The Removed follows the Echota family in the days leading up to the Cherokee National Holiday bonfire that marks fifteen years since their son Ray-Ray was killed in a police shooting. Ernest, Ray-Ray's father, is losing himself to Alzheimer's; his wife Maria carries the weight of caring for him while running the family home; their daughter Sonja moves through a string of short, consuming relationships; and their son Edgar has been living rootless and addicted in Albuquerque.

When the family fosters a troubled teenager named Wyatt, who shares odd, specific similarities with Ray-Ray, the line between memory and the present begins to blur. Brandon Hobson weaves the family's contemporary story together with the voice of Tsala, a Cherokee ancestor killed in 1838 for refusing to leave his land during the Trail of Tears, drawing a direct line between historical removal and the family's ongoing grief.

Told through rotating first-person narration, the novel is a quiet, interior study of a family holding onto each other, and to their dead, across generations.