ABOUT THE BOOK

'I was on the drift from California to someplace that didn't have any bench warrants out on me...'

Doyle Redmond is on the drift from a failed marriage and a floundering life, moving in an easterly direction in the Volvo he stole from his soon-to-be-ex-wife, heading for home: the red and rocky soil of the Ozarks where Redmonds have been farming and fighting since just after the Civil War.

CRITICAL ACCLAIM

'Woodrell alternates between reaming the language with a dry corncob and practising a particularly skilful kind of literary cabinetwork. Tongue in cheek (and most other orifices) he celebrates blood kin, home country and hot sex in this rich, funky, headshakingly original novel.' - E Annie Proulx

"...but let's agree on Woodrell as the foremost exponent of the poetry of trailer-park trash. Woodrell does the best 'country noir' prose there is, and if you want to be hip read him now..." - Susie Maguire, Southern Daily Echo

"Woodrell proves once again that he's one of the finest exponents of American noir writing. His seductive and deceptively lazy style lulls the reader into a false sense of security - and then hits him below the belt. In short, he's an original and first-rate story-teller." - Irish News

"Jane Austen saw far less violence in her world, but move her to South Carolina and you'll get some idea of what Daniel Woodrell is up to." - The Spectator

"Terrific." - Literary Review

Daniel Woodrell's The Death of Sweet Mister is nakedly honest, unsettling, pitch perfect, and uniquely American. Put it on the shelf alongside Faulkner, Jim Thompson, and Cormac McCarthy. With this one, Mr. Woodrell has earned himself a piece of immortality.
George P. Pelecanos

"Daniel Woodrell is a storyteller of bristling imagination and muscular prose, who uses the poetically profane language of the trailerpark to wicked effect. " - Bizarre

"At a time when the two dominant strands of male American fiction to emerge in the last couple of decades - contemporary noir and dirty realism - have largely lapsed into self-parody, a writer from the Ozark mountains of Missouri has come along to resuscitate them both." - John Williams, The Independent

every bit as sharp and twisted as the best of Jim Thompson or Charles Williams...what Daniel Woodrell's come back with are some of the finest, toughest books in American fiction today." - John Williams, Time Out