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Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here Audiobook
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Set during the devastating Memorial Day floods in Texas, a surreal, empathetic novel for readers of Station Eleven and The Age of Miracles.
2015. Eighteen-year-old Boyd Montgomery returns from her grandfather’s wedding to find her friend Isaac missing. Drought-ravaged central Texas has been newly inundated with rain, and flash floods across the state have begun to sweep away people, cars, and entire houses as every river breaks its banks.
In the midst of the rising waters, Boyd sets out across the ravaged back country. She is determined to rescue her missing friend, and she’s not alone in her quest: her neighbor Carla spots Boyd’s boot prints leading away from the safety of home and follows in her path. Hours later, her mother returns to find Boyd missing, and she, too, joins the search.
Boyd, Carla, and Lucy Maud know the land well. They’ve lived in central Texas for their entire lives. But they have no way of knowing the fissure the storm has opened along the back roads, no way of knowing what has been erased—and what has resurfaced. As they each travel through the newly unfamiliar landscape, they discover the ghosts of Texas past and present.
Haunting and timely, Things You Would Know if You Grew Up Around Here considers questions of history and empathy and brings a pre-apocalyptic landscape both foreign and familiar to shockingly vivid life.
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“Precise and full-hearted, reverently attentive to the natural world, and woven through with subtle magic. Like the cataclysmic storm that sets this book in motion, Wayson Dinan’s stunning debut will carry readers clean away.”
— Katie Cortese, author of Make Way for Her and Other Stories
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“This strange brew of a book…is shot through with magical realism and undergirded by a naturalist’s concern for Mother Earth—and it’s all wrapped in lovely sentences. Book groups will have field days discussing this.”
— Booklist (starred review) -
“By turns magical, harshly realistic, poetic, aggravating, and enthralling.”
— Kirkus Reviews -
“Fabulous and engrossing, both faithful to the real-world details of central Texas and wildly imaginative…Dinan’s storytelling flows as forcefully as a flash flood in this spellbinding first novel…An extraordinary novel.”
— Shelf Awareness -
“Proof that the finest American novelist of her generation has taken the stage. Wayson Dinan has created characters so real we can’t help but fall in love with them.”
— Dennis Covington, author of Salvation on Sand Mountain -
“In this myth-like journey, the earth comes alive, the past breaks its bonds, and a girl who understands the deepest griefs of strangers sets out on a desperate search to save a friend.”
— Adelia Saunders, author of Indelible -
“In this astonishing debut novel, dream and dread and hope braid into a single, unforgettable tale. It washes away old boundaries and creates a world that is new, slightly menacing, and thrilling.”
— Erin McGraw, author of The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard -
“A harrowing descent into a central Texas underworld. Wayson Dinan’s novel will drown you with beauty and grief.”
— Micah Dean Hicks, author of Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones
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About Nancy Wayson Dinan
Nancy Wayson Dinan is the managing editor for Iron Horse Literary Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Texas Observer, Arts & Letters, Crab Orchard Review, the Cincinnati Review, and others. She earned her MFA degree from Ohio State University in 2013 and is a PhD student in fiction at Texas Tech University.
About the Narrators
Eileen Stevens is a voice-over actress whose voice can be heard on cartoons, promos, programs for English-language learners, and audiobooks. An Earphones Award–winning narrator, she is also an audiobook director and producer.
Arthur Morey has won three AudioFile Magazine “Best Of” Awards, and his work has garnered numerous AudioFile Earphones Awards and placed him as a finalist for two Audie Awards. He has acted in a number of productions, both off Broadway in New York and off Loop in Chicago. He graduated from Harvard and did graduate work at the University of Chicago. He has won awards for his fiction and drama, worked as an editor with several book publishers, and taught literature and writing at Northwestern University. His plays and songs have been produced in New York, Chicago, and Milan, where he has also performed.