The Removed: A Novel
Brandon Hobson"Brandon Hobson has given us a haunted work, full of voices old & new. It is about a family's reckoning with loss & injustice, & it is about a people trying for the same. The journey of this family's way home is full—in equal measure—of melancholy & love. The Removed is spirited, droll, & as quietly devastating as rain lifting from earth to sky." —Tommy Orange, author of There There
Steeped in Cherokee myths & history, a novel about a fractured family reckoning with the tragic death of their son long ago—from National Book Award finalist Hobson. In the 15 years since their teenage son, Ray-Ray, was killed in a police shooting, the Echota family has been suspended in private grief. The mother, Maria, increasingly struggles to manage the onset of Alzheimer’s in her husband, Ernest. Their adult daughter, Sonja, leads a life of solitude, punctuated only by spells of dizzying romantic obsession. & their son, Edgar, fled home long ago, turning to drugs to mute his feelings of alienation.
With the family’s annual bonfire approaching—an occasion marking both the Cherokee National Holiday & Ray-Ray’s death, & a rare moment in which they openly talk about his memory—Maria attempts to call the family together from their physical & emotional distances once more. But as the bonfire draws near, each of them feels a strange blurring of the boundary between normal life & the spirit world. Maria & Ernest take in a foster child who seems to almost miraculously keep Ernest’s mental fog at bay. Sonja becomes dangerously fixated on a man named Vin, despite—or perhaps because of—his ties to tragedy in her lifetime & lifetimes before. & in the wake of a suicide attempt, Edgar finds himself in the mysterious Darkening Land: a place between the living & the dead, where old atrocities echo.
Drawing deeply on Cherokee folklore, Hobson seamlessly blends the real & spiritual to excavate the deep reverberations of trau