Where All Light Tends to Go by David Joy

 

Holy crap. This might be the most brutal, beautiful novel I've read in a long, long time. Bad things accrete and escalate, to an ending that feels like a punch in the belly. Sparkling prose and deeply human, flawed. believable characters. To the extent there's any hope in the novel, it's not for the main character, there's one person who might escape the story's gravity, her story doesn't feel as though it's ending so much as beginning. If memory serves, this is the novel that made David Joy's reputation; I emphatically see why. It's still ringing in my ears, and I read it yesterday.