Mudbound
First US edition
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| Author | Hillary Jordan |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher |
Alonquin Books (US) HarperCollins (Canada) Heinemann (UK) |
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Publication date
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March 2008 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 328 |
| ISBN | |
Mudbound is the debut novel by American author Hillary Jordan published in March 2008. It has been translated into French, Italian, Serbian, Norwegian, Swedish and Turkish and has sold more than 250,000 copies worldwide. The novel took Jordan seven years to write. She started it while studying for an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University.
In the winter of 1946, Henry McAllen moves his city-bred wife, Laura, from their comfortable home in Memphis to a remote cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta — a place she finds both foreign and frightening. While Henry works the land he loves, Laura struggles to raise their two young children in a crude shack with no indoor plumbing or electricity, under the eye of her hateful, racist father-in-law. When it rains, the waters rise up and swallow the bridge to town, stranding the family in a sea of mud.
As the McAllans are being tested in every way, two celebrated soldiers of World War II return home to the Delta. Jamie McAllan is everything his older brother Henry is not: charming, handsome, and sensitive to Laura’s plight, but also haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eldest son of the black tenant farmers who live on the McAllan farm, comes home from fighting the Nazis with the shine of a war hero, only to face far more personal — and dangerous — battles against the ingrained bigotry of his own countrymen. It is the unlikely friendship of these two brothers-in-arms, and the passions they arouse in others, that drive the novel to its tragic conclusion.
Reviews were generally positive :
Jordan is currently writing a sequel with the working title FATHERLANDS. In MUDBOUND, black American GI Ronsel Jackson has a love affair with a white German woman during the American occupation of Bavaria and ships out for home not knowing he has left her with child. The new novel centers on their illegitimate son, Franz, who is raised in Germany by his impoverished mother. As one of the "Mischlingskinder," mixed-race children who were the products of such controversial unions, he grows up feeling like an outsider who doesn't belong. At 7, his mother is forced to put him into foster care. At 18, Franz sets off for America, determined to find the father he never knew. There, he is caught up in the turmoil of the Civil Rights struggle and forced to navigate a complex tangle of race, history and politics in his search for self-realization.
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