Praise for The River Knows Your Name
Kelly Mustian is a flat-out master storyteller. With a plot as woven and tumultuous as a river current, this story is a profoundly human tale simply dripping with will and strength and heart. Mustian’s storytelling insists there is magnificence amidst darkness if we only persevere. I am a fan.
— Andrew J. Graff, author of True North and Raft of Stars
With masterful prose, Kelly Mustian weaves together a generational saga that explores the ties that bind and the forces that seek to tear them apart. The River Knows Your Name is a richly atmospheric tapestry of hidden pasts, resilient spirits, and the human heart’s proclivity for tenacity and truth.
— Meagan Church, bestselling author of The Girls We Sent Away and The Last Carolina Girl
A well-woven mystery that also plumbs the depths of the human heart, intertwining the power and wildness of the natural world and the risks people take for love. A novel about both running from the past and running after it, it woke me up early and kept me up late.
— Ash Davidson, author of Damnation Spring
The River Knows Your Name is a captivating tale of love, loss and found family set in the lush and wild Mississippi Delta. Mustian’s plucky, determined female characters grip your heart. You won’t be able to put the book down until the last puzzle piece of their dual-timeline family mystery clicks into place.
Praise for The Girls in the Stilt House
Remarkable debut. . . . shocking twist of fate. . . . vivid setting . . . nearly flawless tale of loss, perseverance, and redemption.
— Publishers Weekly starred review
The two young women at the heart of this rich debut come of age under the hardest of circumstances, and Kelly Mustian has given us their world entire. We ache for their sorrows, we cheer for their victories, and we recognize both ourselves and our nation in their troubles and their hopes.
— Jon Clinch, author of Marley and Finn
An astonishingly assured debut, The Girls in the Stilt House draws you in, holds you spellbound, and will move you to tears. With emotional impact and gut-wrenching power, this unforgettable novel is the best book I’ve read in a very long time, and I’m sure I won’t be the only one who thinks so. A triumph!
— Elizabeth Letts, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Finding Dorothy
In a world too cruel to make a place for them, Matilda and Ada become an army of two, fighting a war for their own refuge. This is a gripping novel about friendship, danger, isolation, and the vivid, dripping, moving landscape of a Mississippi swamp.
— Nina de Gramont, author of The Christie Affair
Kelly Mustian’s The Girls in the Stilt House is a triumph, a heartbreaking and ultimately uplifting debut that’s as rich and lush as the Natchez Trace where the story takes place. Mustian’s lyrical prose, combined with her deep insight into the resiliency of the human spirit, makes this novel shine. You know a book is good when you wish you’d written it!
— Karen Dionne, international bestselling author of The Marsh King’s Daughter
Readers will be held in this novel’s grasp from start to finish, experiencing tension and unease, the resilience of human spirit and hope, and the power and sensitivity provided by a great new voice in literary fiction.
— Damita Nocton, The Country Bookshop
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© 2020 Kelly Mustian
