Play Audiobook Sample
Lawless: Originally Published as The Wettest County in the World Audiobook
Play Audiobook Sample
(2.00) - 1 listener ratings
Quick Stats About this Audiobook
Total Audiobook Chapters:
Longest Chapter Length:
Shortest Chapter Length:
Average Chapter Length:
Audiobooks by this Author:
Publisher Description
Based on the true story of his grandfather and two granduncles, Matt Bondurant's novel is a gripping tale of brotherhood, greed, and murder. The Bondurant boys were a notorious gang of roughnecks and moonshiners who ran liquor through Franklin County during Prohibition and after. The brothers played a central role in a major conspiracy trial and its violent end. In 1935, Sherwood Anderson, working on a magazine story, finds himself driving along the dusty red roads trying to find the brothers and break the silence that shrouds Franklin County. In vivid, muscular prose, Matt Bondurant brings these men—their dark deeds, their long silences, their deep desires—to life. His understanding of the passion, violence, and desperation at the center of this world is both heartbreaking and magnificent.
Download and start listening now!
“Part family history, part fiction, Matt Bondurant’s somber, engrossing novel, [Lawless], patches together the legend of his paternal grandfather and uncles, a fearsome trio of bootleggers in rural Prohibition-era Virginia. He’s wonderful at evoking historical atmosphere—the elaborate stills camouflaged in the woods, the music, the drunken gatherings that explode into shattering violence.”
— Entertainment Weekly
Quotes
-
“Bondurant is a nimble writer…The liveliness of his writer makes it hard for event he most lily-livered to look away…Bondurant’s prose is lyrical.”
— New York Times Book Review -
“Descriptively gritty and emotionally resonant, novelist Bondurant dramatically projects the poverty and danger at the heart of the old-time bootlegging life.”
— Booklist -
“Bondurant writes fiercely and passionately…We are aware from the first page that we are in the hands of a remarkable storyteller.”
— San Francisco Chronicle -
“Bondurant endows his gritty story with all the puzzle-solving satisfactions of a mystery. It’s a gripping, relentless tale, delivered in no-nonsense prose.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review) -
“Pull up a chair and settle in for this fascinating story…This work of fiction is beautifully crafted and eloquently performed…Erik Steele masterfully navigates vocal shifts and offers a genuine appreciation for the prose, which is vividly violent and sparklingly descriptive by turns.”
— AudioFile -
“A cracklingly good novel, with plenty of action and local color.”
— Library Journal -
“Whether fiction or biography, it succeeds in delivering a pungent slice of Americana, a portrait of a place and an era and a way of life that is part romantic, part viscerally violent, part metaphorical, all wrapped in a kind of rural poetry.”
— Boston Globe
Lawless Listener Reviews
-
—
K K , 12/17/2016
About Matt Bondurant
Matt Bondurant’s previous novels include Oleander City, a historical novel about the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, The Night Swimmer, which was featured in the New York Times Book Review and Outside magazine, The Wettest County in the World, an international bestseller that was adapted into the feature film Lawless, and his first novel, The Third Translation, also an international bestseller, translated into fourteen languages. Matt has published numerous short stories, poems, essays, and book reviews, as well as feature articles specializing in adventure and endurance sports. He currently lives in Oxford, Mississippi.
About Erik Steele
Erik Steele is a professional actor living in New York City, where he has worked both on and off Broadway and in film. He has toured with the prestigious Acting Company, performing Shakespeare and Sheridan in theaters from Atlanta to Anchorage. He holds an MFA in acting from New York University and a BA from Vassar College.