Novel set in USA, VIETNAM and JAPAN
Southern Cross The Dog

Location(s): Mississippi
Genre(s): Fiction, Historical
Era(s): Late 1920s
When the Great Flood of 1927 devastates Mississippi, eight-year-old Robert Chatham loses everything. Robert’s adventures in the brooding swamplands – from hard labour to imprisonment to thwarted love – are full of courage, danger and heartbreak. This is story of how a small, hurt boy becomes a tough young man: forced to choose between the lure of the future and the claims of his past. Set against one of the great American landscapes, Southern Cross the Dog is a mesmerizing and savagely beautiful novel. It marks the arrival of Bill Cheng as a writer of astonishing gifts.
The author “decided the story should take place in Mississippi because it was the birthplace of the blues, but didn’t set out to write an explicitly blues novel. “I just looked for the things that show up a lot in the music, images and icons that are prominent in music – the flood, the Devil, the hellhouse,” he said. “The story formed itself around that.” From its opening pages, “Southern Cross the Dog” has all the markers of a novel written in the finest Southern gothic tradition. The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 sweeps in, taking a few unlucky characters with it. There are references aplenty to race, poverty, the blues, voodoo and an ill-fated brothel” The author via the NY Times
To review this book, please