The Ploughmen: A Novel

"Valentine Millimaki is a reticent, insomniac sheriff’s deputy in Montana; John Gload is the jailed remorseless murderer Millimaki has been assigned to keep an eye on. Kim Zupan’s debut novel is an unsettling meditation on the nature of good and evil, beautifully executed and dark as pitch. Zupan is an unsparing writer, but also a generous, deeply compassionate one, and the relationship between Millimaki and Gload is one of the most troubling, truest ones in recent American fiction."