Work Like Any Other
Virginia ReevesA man’s life spirals out of control in Virginia Reeves’ deeply affecting story of dispossession, injustice and redemption, set in 1920s rural Alabama.
When his scam to syphon electricity from the state goes tragically wrong, Roscoe, an electrician turned farmer, finds his whole life collapsing around him. As he goes to trial he is abandoned by his wife, leaving him to face his 20-year sentence alone. No longer an electrician or even a farmer, an unmoored Roscoe must now carve out his place in a dangerous and violent new world.
“Eloquent and acutely self-aware… Prose so lovely that it strains credulity… Elegant.” – Kirkus Reviews
“The novel's great strength is that in showing so much in terms of race, our prison system, forgiveness and labour, it never is heavy-handed. . . . Reeves' nuance for these people and this story is, indeed, quite powerful.”
– Hans Weyandt, Minneapolis Star-Tribune
Virginia Reeves: is a writer and a teacher. A graduate of the Michener Center for Writers, her debut novel, Work Like Any Other, was longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and the Man Booker Prize. Booklist named it to their Top 10 First Novels of 2016, and the French translation, Un travail comme un autre won the Page/America prize and the SensCritique prize for best American debut.