Written by: Matt Sloan

Stereo Embers’ Editor Alex Green will be in conversation with author David Joy next week (Feb 4) at A Great Good Place For Books in Oakland.

The even begins at 7pm.

Joy’s new book Where All Light Tends To Go was hailed by the Huffington Post as, “savagely moving” while The New York Times Book Review praised Joy’s debut novel for being an, “extraordinarily intimate experience.”

Set against the backdrop of Cashiers, North Carolina, Where All Light Tends To Go centers around eighteen-year-old Jacob McNeely, who works with his father at his auto body shop. But the auto body shop is a front for an insidious meth ring and Jacob, who has watched his classmates graduate from the high school he dropped out of, knows it’s all a dead end and on borrowed time. Although Jacob reunites with Maggie, the love of his life whose heart he broke years ago, the good news ends there. After a mistake turns fatal, Jacob is suddenly faced with a life-changing decision: stay and rally behind his father or disappear with Maggie over the mountains.

“It’s the set-up of a Springsteen song,” Green says of the book. “Stay and burn or grab the girl and get out of town. It’s riveting work.”

Although this is the Pushcart Prize-nominated Joy’s first novel, he has two more books coming out in the next two years.