A Land More Kind Than Home is a quiet whirlpool of a novel that will pull you under and hold you fast. Folded between its pages, the big scenes are laid like traps: adultery, snake handling, dirty secrets, forgotten history, and death. But over these traps are laid layers of a prose so deftly constructed that you'll forget you're reading a book and not just listening to the characters talk. For this midwestern girl, it was like sitting on a porch on a mountainside, fanning away the North Carolina heat, listening to a stranger talking.

Cash has an amazing skill for voice, and has created multiple narrators here, distinct but connected. Cash is not a writer who will dazzle you with tricks -- his grace is in his restraint. In fact his quiet control is almost maddening at times, given the intensity of the subject matter. The volume only increases inside the reader's head, and Cash's ability to deliver this story without any narrative agitation makes the lasting impact more fierce. His prose does not call attention to itself. The characters are authentic and immediate. The story is dark, and very real.