Excerpt from Wastelands by Corban Addison, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

In time, he rises again and sets out for Limestone Creek, a quiet tributary of the Northeast Cape Fear River that meanders for miles in an arc around the town of Beulaville. There is a pool he frequents on days like this, when even shelter is not enough to break the heat. The pool is too shallow to swim in. But it is clear and cool on his skin and covered by deep shade, and once in a while he sees fish darting among the rocks.

At the pool, he takes off his shoes and steps into the gently flowing water. It splashes on his ankles and tickles him enough to make him laugh. He moves his feet deeper, until the water laps around his calves. It is a blissful feeling, but the rest of him is still coated in sweat. On impulse, he sits down in the water and reclines his body, immersing himself in the stream.

As the water washes over him, cleansing his pores and cooling his skin, he looks up through the branches at the same gem-cut sky that has captured Elsie Herring's fancy fifteen miles away. He doesn't think about the life pulsing through him or where the years ahead will take him. He wastes precious little thought on the future. But even if he pondered it like Aristotle, his mind could not conceive how time will change the land he loves—the forests turned into fields, and the fields converted into industrial farms; the hog barns laid out row upon row, thousands of pigs packed into them like sardines; the great pits hewn into mud and clay to store the waste of a small city; and that waste sprayed out into the air and onto the soil until the ground can hold no more of it, until a breath smells of effluent and the streams run with poison.

Ideas such as these are as foreign to young Woodell as the towers of New York City and the turrets of the Taj Mahal. Nor can Woodell imagine that his path, in the coming decades, will converge with Elsie's and hundreds of other people like them, and that their collective memories of the land, and their passion for its dignity, will fuel a titanic battle for the soul of this place, and, more broadly, of eastern North Carolina.

Lying in the stream, Woodell is marvelously oblivious to all of this. Just as he should be. He is a boy in summer. His belly is full, and his heart is light. His family is close by.

He is home.

Excerpted from Wastelands by Corban Addison. Copyright © 2022 by Corban Addison. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.