Each Time You Carry Me This Way

Self-determined misfits in the 1960’s hardscrabble mountain town of Yellow Camp, the Phillips family is close. Even so, the scandalous and bullying Roy, his shrewd wife Doll, and unwary children R.J. and Ruby each carry the seed of irresistible calamity.

When fifteen-year-old Ruby disappears one day without a trace, her brother is left stunned by grief. Afterwards a baby turns up tied by a string to the porch, and a hoard of unsettled scores and secrets swarm into play as Roy and Doll square off over the child’s fate, RJ. paralyzed between them. Years later Ruby unpacks these events in a voice that is scrupulous, deadpan, dignified, wry—as free of convention as it is inscribed by the stringent beauty of the mountains she still calls home.

Taut and lyrically penetrating, Each Time You Carry Me This Way explores the lineage of landscape and the unshakable archetypes of myth as they stir, stand up, and take over our everyday lives.

Trace Farrell is the author of three other novels, The Amateur, The Bear, and The Ruins, winner of the New York University Press Prize for Fiction.

Trace Farrell is the author of three other novels, The Amateur, The Bear, and The Ruins, winner of the New York University Press Prize for Fiction.