NEW NOVEL
Two men come to the same Appalachian ridge, eighteen years apart.
The first is Neal “Shiv” Ryder, home from a Sahel counterinsurgency operation fought over rare earth minerals and not yet quite right. He comes to southern Virginia carrying a box of his best friend Sal’s ashes, an infant goddaughter named Nada, and Sal’s Cherokee partner Enna, with whom things are complicated. He is looking for a soil farmer who speaks in parables and is trying to build something durable enough to outlast an America sliding toward nuclear annihilation.
Eighteen years later, after the nuclear strike, here comes Arjun Jenkins, riding a BMX bike three thousand miles east, away from the cabin where he watched his parents die of radiation sickness, carrying his father’s Glock and one thing he did on the road he can’t set down. He finds the place still standing—hogs and laying hens, corn whisky, a turbine spinning in an underground river, a disabled great-aunt who has never spoken a word, and Nada grown, catching rat snakes bare-handed and claiming she can read his mind.
What comes for them is a militia church out of Pennsylvania, led by a shy, funny, weeping pastor who preaches heresy and humor and intends to take dominion over what’s left of America by force.
Braiding the Hindu Trimūrti with Zen, the Gnostic gospels, the Beguine mystics, Tsalagi cosmology, and St. John of the Cross, Jesus Particles asks what holds when everything else lets go—the molecular fact that the dead persist in every glass of wine and loaf of bread, or the stubborn, inadequate love of the people still standing after the crucifixion of Christ. Written in a polyphonic first-person vernacular, it moves from dark comedy to incantation.
Jesus Particles returns to the Jenkins family of Chasing Syntropy, its companion novel.
Represented by: Laura Strachan, Strachan Literary Agency
