2011: Mudbound

About the Book

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 rude 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 this powerful debut novel.

Mudbound is told in riveting personal narratives by the individual members of the McAllan and Jackson families. As they strive for love and honor in a brutal time and place, they become players in a tragedy on the grandest scale and find redemption where they least expect it.

This is storytelling at its most indelible — fierce, unflinching and deeply human. Mudbound won the 2006 Bellwether Prize for Fiction, awarded biannually to a first literary novel that addresses issues of social justice.

About the Author

Hillary Jordan received her BA in English and Political Science from Wellesley College and spent fifteen years working as an advertising copywriter before starting to write fiction. She got her MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University.

Mudbound, published by Algonquin Books in March 2008, is her first novel. It was named one of the Top Ten Debut Novels of the Decade by Paste Magazine. It won the 2006 Bellwether Prize, founded by Barbara Kingsolver and awarded biennially to an unpublished debut novel that addresses issues of social justice, and a 2009 Alex Award from the American Library Association. Mudbound was also the 2008 NAIBA (New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Assoc.) Fiction Book of the Year and was longlisted for the 2009 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

Hillary grew up in Dallas, TX and Muskogee, OK. She lives in NYC.

Read the Daily News Profile Story on Hillary Jordan

2011 Update

Jordan’s second novel, “When She Woke,” was released in October 2011. The novel was among autumn’s most acclaimed. Jordan followed the book’s release with a 2 1/2-month book took that took her to 38 events, including one in Buffalo.