SOME GO HOME

Winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction

A searing debut novel that follows three generations—fractured by murder, seeking redemption—in fictional Pitchlynn, Mississippi.

An Iraq war veteran turned small town homemaker, Colleen works hard to keep her deployment behind her—until pregnancy brings her buried trauma to the surface. She hides her mounting anxiety from her husband, Derby, who is in turn preoccupied with the media frenzy surrounding the long-overdue retrial of his father, Hare Hobbs, for a civil rights–era murder.

ENDORSEMENTS

“Some Go Home is an extraordinary novel. It is lived-in in its particulars, told in energetic and evocative prose, and has as much insight into the peculiar ways the past informs the present as any book you’re likely to encounter this year. But more than that, Odie Lindsey seems to have a notion about what all that might mean for where we’re headed, and not just for those of us with some connection to the American South, but for any human being attempting to go forth in a world as strange as ours in a time as strange as this.”

- Kevin Powers, National Book Award finalist and author of The Yellow Birds

“Every now and then (and never as often as it should), Mississippi faces an accounting, and Odie Lindsey has shown up with receipts. Some Go Home reckons with blood ties, buried secrets, and the poisons of possession, reminding us that race and class sit inside each other, in permanent headlock. This is staccato realism; these sentences pop in the mouth like blackberries. ‘You needed lies to make memory,’ one character cautions. To make fiction you need truth, and Lindsey offers it here in crystalline quantity.”

-Katy Simpson Smith, author of The Everlasting

“Some Go Home has the grit, power, and soul of Janis Joplin and the hardscrabble depth of Johnny Cash. Odie Lindsey brings Pitchlynn and North Mississippi to life better than anybody's business—you will recognize the landscape, the language, and the people as real... Some Go Home will have a long and happy life in the American mind. This novel is nothing short of thrilling.”

-Randall Kenan, author of Let the Dead Bury Their Dead

“Some Go Home is both timely and timeless, its prose crackling and sparkling with energy and humor and characters who by the end are as real as the people next door. Terrific, just plain terrific.”

-Tom Franklin, New York Times bestselling author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“Every page of Some Go Home blooms with verdant, undeniable, heart-lifting life. A truly welcome addition to the literature of the New American South.”

-Margaret Renkl, bestselling author of Late Migrations, A Natural History of Love and Loss

New York Times Book Review “The characters carry the day in Some Go Home, a polished debut novel.”

Southern Review of Books “Odie Lindsey: ‘Home is People’”

Electric Literature, in conversation with Kelly Luce “Tearing Down the False Monuments of the South.

Chapter 16 / Memphis Commercial-Appeal / Nashville Scene "Some Go Home will be remembered as among the most timely and timeless novels of this troubled and troubling year."

Southwest Review, interview with Mary Miller “The Fish That Can't Escape the Pond: An Interview with Odie Lindsey”

Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Lindsey’s incandescent debut novel captures a riveting slice of life from the deep South… In dazzling prose, the author lassos complex subjects with acuity, from the legacy of racism in Mississippi to internecine class wars, the horror of combat, and the joy and terror of becoming a mother. This is a consummate portrait of human fragility and grim determination."

Garden & Gun "Some Go Home, Odie Lindsey’s charismatic debut novel, puts another fictional Mississippi town on the map.”

BookPage, “8 Major Debuts of the Summer” "Told in hypnotic and at times sharp-witted prose, Some Go Home asks what land means to us, what we will do for that land and who we’ll become along the way."

Kirkus "A compassionate and complex debut, assuredly encompassing post–Iraq War fiction and old-fashioned Southern gothic."

The Common “Reading the three-page first chapter of Some Go Home, I had the ‘Hell Yeah’ feeling”

Atlanta Journal-Constitution "Perhaps stripping Colleen of any sense of femininity was Lindsey's intent." (Oh, wait: "Lindsey has a visceral and captivating way with words.”)

Time Now “the interplay of modern war and the modern American South”

Southern Review of Books, “The Best Southern Books of July 2020”