In the tradition of Cormac McCarthy and Flannery O'Connor, Bill Cheng's Southern Cross the Dog is an epic literary debut in which the bonds between three childhood friends are upended by the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. In its aftermath, one young man must choose between the lure of the future and the claims of the past.

Having lost virtually everything in the fearsome storm -- home, family, first love -- Robert Chatham embarks on an odyssey that takes him through the deep South, from the desperation of a refugee camp to the fiery and raucous brothel Hotel Beau-Miel and into the Mississippi hinterland, where he joins a crew hired to clear the swamp and build a dam.

Along his journey he encounters piano-playing hustlers, ne'er-do-well Klansmen, well-intentioned whores, and a family of fur trappers, the L'Etangs, whose very existence is threatened by the swamp-clearing around them. The L'Etang brothers are fierce and wild but there is something soft about their cousin Frankie, possibly the only woman capable of penetrating Robert's darkest places and overturning his conviction that he's marked by the devil.

Teeming with language that renders both the savage beauty and complex humanity of our shared past, Southern Cross the Dog is a tour de force that heralds the arrival of a major new voice in fiction.

• We started tracking this book on May 2, 2013.
• This book was $11.04 when we started tracking it.
• The price of this book has changed 112 times in the past 4,183 days.
• The current price of this book is $6.99 last checked one day ago.
• This lowest price this book has been offered at in the past year is $0.99.
• The lowest price to date was $0.99 last reached on September 9, 2024.
• This book has been $0.99 3 times since we started tracking it.
• The highest price to date was $12.99 last reached on January 15, 2014.
• This book has been $12.99 one time since we started tracking it.

• Literature & Fiction

• Text-to-Speech: Disabled
• Lending: Disabled
• Print Length: 333 Pages
• File Size: 1,155 KB