Two-Step Devil

WINNER OF THE WILLIE MORRIS AWARD FOR SOUTHERN WRITING - FICTION

“Jamie Quatro is a writer of sinuous, muscular power and grace. Two-Step Devil is a starkly gorgeous story of God and loss and art and love, and her best book yet.” —Lauren Groff

From a New York Times Notable “writer of great originality” comes a bold new novel about love, faith and two societal outsiders whose lives converge in the contemporary American South

The “fearless” (New Yorker) author of I Want to Show You More and Fire Sermon—whose recently published stories in The New Yorker and The Paris Review have brought her new attention—is known for her sharp, seductive prose and masterful exploration of the divine and the carnal in daily life. In Two-Step Devil, Quatro delivers a striking and formally inventive story of the unlikely relationship between two strangers on the margins of society and the shadowy forces that threaten their futures.

In 2014, in Lookout Mountain, Alabama, the Prophet—a seventy-year-old man who paints his visions—lives off the grid in a cabin near the Georgia border. While scrounging for materials at the local scrapyard, the Prophet sees a car pull up to an abandoned gas station. In the back seat is a teenage girl with zip ties on her wrists, a girl he realizes he must rescue from her current life. Her name is Michael, and the Prophet feels certain that she is a messenger sent by God to take his end-time warnings to the White House. Michael finds herself in the Prophet’s remote, art-filled cabin, and as their uncertain dynamic evolves into tender friendship, she is offered a surprising opportunity to escape her past—and perhaps change her future.

Moving through the worlds of the Prophet, the girl, and a beguiling devil figure who dances in the corner of their lives, Two-Step Devil is a propulsive, philosophical examination of fate and faith that dares to ask what salvation, if any, can be found in our modern world.

Jamie Quatro is the New York Times Notable author of I Want to Show You More, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, and Fire Sermon, a Book of the Year for the Economist, San Francisco Chronicle, LitHub, Bloomberg, and the Times Literary Supplement. Quatro’s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, the New York Review of Books and Ploughshares. She is the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, and Maison Dora Maar, and teaches in the Sewanee School of Letters MFA program. Quatro lives with her family in Chattanooga, Tennessee.