May 2020

​In 1989, Jodi McCarty is seventeen years old when she’s sentenced to life in prison. She’s released eighteen years later and finds herself at a Greyhound bus stop, reeling from the shock of unexpected freedom. Not yet able to return to her lost home in the Appalachian mountains, she goes searching for someone she left behind, but on the way, she meets and falls in love with Miranda, a troubled young mother. Together, they try to make a fresh start, but is that even possible in a town that refuses to change? Set within the charged insularity of rural West Virginia, Sugar Run is a searing and gritty debut about making a run for another life.

Mesha Maren is an Assistant Professor at Duke University and serves as a National Endowment of the Arts Writing Fellow at the federal prison camp in Alderson, West Virginia. Her short stories and essays can be read in The Oxford American, Crazyhorse, Triquarterly, The Southern Review, Ecotone, and elsewhere. She was the recipient of the 2015 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, a 2014 Elizabeth George Foundation grant, and fellowships from  the MacDowell Colony, Ucross Foundation, and Lincoln Memorial University. Sugar Run is her debut novel.

If this sounds like something you'd like to read, you can get your copy of the book from the store or online with a 15% discount through the end of May. Remember, you can have it shipped directly to you or come pick it up curbside! This riveting story is also available as an audiobook through our partner Libro.fm.

Buy Here:

Hardcover
Paperback
Audiobook

Reviews & Interviews:

"After 18 Years in Prison, A Woman Tries to Find Her Way Home" -- The NY Times
"Sugar Run: A Novel" -- Washington Independent Review of Books
"Hopes and Hopes and Hopes: On Mesha Maren's 'Sugar Run'" -- LA Review of Books
"Mesha Maren: How I Write" -- The Writer
"With 'Sugar Run', Mesha Maren crafts a gritty noir novel like you've never read" --Entertainment Weekly
"A New Novel Makes the "Sugar Run" Out of Jail and Back to West Virginia"-- NPR

We'll meet online via Zoom on May 30th at 7:30 pm. You can follow the link here to join in or get more information from our Facebook page. We want to know what you thought about the book, even if you didn't finish it and we can't wait to "see" you there. Read on!