Bitter Milk Paperback / softback - 2005

From the Whiting Award--winning writer John McManus comes a debut novel of startling originality and mystery. The son of an unknown father and an ostracized mother, and the next of kin in a long line of bastard relatives, nine-year-old Loren Garland lives a life of subtle mystery beneath the shadow of an East Tennessee mountain. It is on his family's broken-down estate that Loren's imagination grows, and with it, the extraordinary voice of Bitter Milk---a young boy named Luther, who may be Loren's imaginary friend, his conscience, or his evil twin. And yet outside the puzzle of Loren's brain, there are the darker goings-on of his family: his mother, who wishes she were a man; his new uncle, who plans to develop the Garland land into real estate; and his withered grandfather, who holds the clan together through truculence and fear. When his mother disappears, Loren must set out on a quest of his own devising, tossing aside the trappings of youth in order to discover the truth of the world.

Advance Praise for Bitter Milk

"An impressive follow-up to his two striking collections of stories, the brilliant, mordant Bitter Milk consolidates John McManus's place as one of the most powerful and original American writers of the twenty-first century."---Madison Smartt Bell, author of The Stone That the Builder Refused

"This mysterious, almost phantasmagoric, debut novel is reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy's The Orchard Keeper in its precociousness. McManus writes with a wisdom and empathy that belies his youth. Bitter Milk signals the arrival of an important new voice in Southern literature."---Ron Rash, author of One Foot in Eden and Saints at the River

John McManus was raised in Blount County, Tennessee. The author of the story collections Born on a Train and Stop Breakin Down, he became the youngest ever recipient of the Whiting Writers' Award in 2000. McManus currently divides his time between Tennessee and Austin, Texas.