The Girls in the Stilt House

Set in 1920s Mississippi,this debut Southern novel weaves a beautiful and harrowing story of two teenage girls cast in an unlikely partnership through murder–perfect for readers of Where the Crawdads Singand If the Creek Don’t Rise. Ada promised herself she would never go back to the Traceto her hard life on the swamp and her harsh father. But nowafter running away to Baton Rouge and briefly knowing a different kind of lifeshe finds herself with nowhere to go but back home. And she knows there will be a price to pay with her father. Matildadaughter of a sharecropperis from the other side of the Trace. Doing what she can to protect her family from the whims and demands of some particularly callous locals is an ongoing struggle. She forms a plan to go northto pack up the secrets she’s holding about her life in the South and hang them on the line for all to see in Ohio. As the two girls are drawn deeper into a dangerous world of bootleggers and moral corruptionthey must come to terms with the complexities of their tenuous bond and a hidden past that links them in ways that could cost them their lives.