Scrapper

A man embarks on a desperate quest for redemption in a devastated Detroit, in this novel that “has the feel of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road . . . Powerful” (Publishers Weekly). Detroit has descended into ruin. Kelly scavenges for scrap metal from the hundred thousand abandoned buildings in a part of the city known as “the zone”—an increasingly wild landscape where one day he finds something far more valuable than the copper he’s come to steal: a kidnapped boy, crying out for rescue. Briefly, Kelly is celebrated as a hero. But even after he has brought the boy to safety, he is driven to secretly avenge this crime and solve the mystery behind the kidnapping—a task that will take him deeper into the zone, and into a confrontation with his own past and long-buried traumas. From the acclaimed author of In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, Scrapper is a devastating reimagining of one of America’s greatest cities, its beautiful architecture, its lost houses, shuttered factories, boxing gyms, and storefront churches. With precise, powerful prose, it asks: What do we owe for our crimes, even those we’ve committed to protect the people we love?