The Twelve-Mile Straight

“[A] superb novel whose roots can be traced to Harper Lee and Carson McCullers”—from the New York Times –bestselling author of Ten Thousand Saints ( O, The Oprah Magazine ). Cotton County, Georgia, 1930: in a house full of secrets, two babies—one light-skinned, the other dark—are born to Elma Jesup, a white sharecropper’s daughter. Accused of her rape, field hand Genus Jackson is lynched and dragged behind a truck down the Twelve-Mile Straight, the road to the nearby town. In the aftermath, the