The Walls Are Closing In On Us

Circus performers. Mountain lions. A fight to the death. A half deer/half man. Love and death. A cabin in the woods. A fictional retelling of a mysterious ancestor. The Walls Are Closing In On Us is a Southern odyssey that follows George, a dying Choctaw and white man, reckoning with the ghosts of his past as he bleeds out beside a cold North Carolina river, hundreds of miles from home.

Starting with his childhood in Mississippi, The Walls Are Closing In On Us travels across the southeast – by car, foot, and train – along with George on his search for love, anonymity and a quiet life. Only by reexamining a lifetime of flight, grief and the haunting consequences of a teenage act of survival, can George be allowed some version the solitude he's been searching for.

Based ever so slightly on a true story, this Southern odyssey explores what it means to be anyone at all, and how even the simple act of reading someone’s name is enough to bring them back to life – no matter if they wish to remain forgotten.

Advanced Praise:
“Mournful, epic, revelatory: The Walls Are Closing in On Us tells the life of one man scaled against a world and time more richly drawn than any I've read in years. Brown writes with uncommon grace, weaving a tapestry of memory and regret so real you can feel it in your bones. This has the wonder and sorrow of Denis Johnson's Train Dreams and the raw power of classic Southern fiction. A sweeping evocation of a lost time and a forgotten life.”

-Kent Wascom, author of the Washington Post’s and NPR’s best book of the year The Blood of Heaven

"With traces of Paul Harding's Tinkers and Denis Johnson's Train Dreams, The Walls are Closing In On Us is a moving novel about racial tensions, segregation, and coming of age in a rapidly changing America. This is a book that examines not only the soul of a man but—perhaps—the soul of a nation."

- Austin Ross, author of Gloria Patri