£7.99
“You’d think she was an angel if she wasn’t always flying so close to hell.”
Released from prison on probation, 19-year-old Harper Haley returns to the brutal, sweaty, dogwood scented landscape of her youth. Chronicling her homecoming and struggle for rehabilitation, this is the story of one girl’s sin, guilt and resurrection.
At the heart of the novel is the dangerous, obsessive sisterhood between Harper and her childhood friends Collier, a seductively destructive debutante, and Caro, a jaded dreamer yearning for escape. As Harper backslides into a violent cycle of sex, drugs and abuse,
the sisterhood at the core of her identity, and of the story, begins to unravel.
Climaxing in the confession of the act that irreversibly altered her life and those closest to her, Dogwood is Harper’s story, the one she can’t forget and the one she cannot speak.
Dogwood is an extraordinary debut novel. Parnell writes in the pitch-perfect dialect of the American South as she tells the story of three girls growing up in Virginia. Crime, drug addiction, faith and — more than anything else — friendship, are the themes explored in the heat and dust of small-town Virginia.
Tender and brutal, beautiful and raw
— Heidi James
FREE SAMPLE Download the first chapter of Dogwood
EBOOK Purchase the eBook from amazon.co.uk
PAPERBACK Buy the paperback directly from Linen Press using the button below:
Lindsay Parnell was raised in Virginia. Her short fiction has appeared in 3AM Magazine, The Prague Review, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Fem and others. She owns 13 editions of The Bell Jar and shares a birthday with Meryl Streep. Dogwood is her first novel.
ISBN: 978-0-9575968-2-5
Published: March 2015
“Parnell’s work is that rare beast – tender and brutal, beautiful and raw. Her prose sings off the page, though it’s with the voice of a debauched choir boy.”
— Heidi James, author of Wounding
“A compelling debut novel. Raw and violent, yet passionate, lyrical and beautifully written.”
— Vesna Goldsworthy, aauthor of Gorsky and Chernobyl Strawberries
“Lindsay Parnell’s dialogue has a startling and exciting immediacy. Her American South has its literary roots in Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty, but with a difference. Her characters swear a lot, smoke a lot, drink a lot, and do everything to believable excess. This is a really promising debut.”
— Paul Bailey, Booker-shortlisted author of Chapman’s Odyssey and The Prince’s Boy
