David Joy In Conversation With Leah Hampton

David Joy will be in the bookshop discussing his latest novel, Those We Thought We Knew, with Leah Hampton. Perfect for fans of Ron Rash and Michael Farris Smith!

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About the Book

"In every line of this outstanding novel, you feel David Joy’s deep connection to the mountains he comes from and the people who live there. With his faultless ear for dialogue and exceptional sense of place, he has crafted a beautiful literary crime thriller about belonging and betrayal in rural America." –Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on the Train and Slow Fire Burning

Toya Gardner, a young Black artist from Atlanta, has returned to her ancestral home in the North Carolina mountains to trace her family history and complete her graduate thesis. But when she encounters a still-standing Confederate monument in the heart of town, she sets her sights on something bigger.

Meanwhile, local deputies find a man sleeping in the back of a station wagon and believe him to be nothing more than some slack-jawed drifter. Yet a search of the man’s vehicle reveals that he is a high-ranking member of the Klan, and the uncovering of a notebook filled with local names threatens to turn the mountain on end.

After two horrific crimes split the county apart, every soul must wrestle with deep and unspoken secrets that stretch back for generations. THOSE WE THOUGHT WE KNEW is an urgent unraveling of the dark underbelly of a community. Richly drawn and bracingly honest, it asks what happens when the people you’ve always known turn out to be monsters, what do you do when everything you ever believed crumbles away?

About the Author

David Joy is the author of When These Mountains Burn (winner of the 2020 Dashiell Hammett Award), The LineThat Held Us (winner of the 2018 SIBA Book Prize), The Weight of This World, and Where All Light Tends to Go (Edgar finalist for Best First Novel). Joy lives in Tuckasegee, North Carolina.

About the Conversation Partner

Leah Hampton writes about Appalachia, corpses, ecoanxiety, and smart women. She currently serves as the Environmental Humanities and Creative Writing Fellow in Residence at the University of Idaho’s Confluence Lab. Her debut collection, F*ckface and Other Stories, was released by Henry Holt and was named one of the best books of 2020 by The Paris Review, the New York Public Library, and Slate. A graduate of the Michener Center for Writers, she has been awarded multiple prizes and fellowships and held residencies at the Stadler Center for Poetry, the Folger Shakespeare Library, Hedgebrook, Jentel, and elsewhere. Her work has appeared in places like Ecotone, Guernica, McSweeneys Quarterly Concern, Electric Literature, storySouth, and LitHub. She lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains and in Moscow, Idaho.