The Palms: A Novel

A killer on parole. A little girl next door. One year of grace.

Ronnie Wells is sixty-eight years old and has been out of prison for a year. He keeps his trailer clean, works at a hardware store, and sits on his porch swing thinking about a daughter he has never met. He has not had a drink or thrown a punch since 1979, the night he killed a man with his hands.

Next door lives Mary. She is seven. Her mother, Clara, is young and beautiful and turns tricks for a pimp named Joe, and Mary has spent more nights sleeping in the back seat of a car than in a bed. When Ronnie fixes up abicycle and teaches her to ride it, he is only trying to be kind. When he teaches her to play the guitar, he is alreadylost.

For one autumn in a trailer park called the Palms, three broken people make something like a family. Clara gets clean. Mary stops being afraid. Ronnie learns to pray. Then Clara relapses, Joe comes to collect, and Mary is sold tomen who have no intention of giving her back.

Ronnie knows what he is. He has spent thirty-six years trying not to be it. Now the only question is whether he canbe it one more time, and for how long, and whether there will be anything left of him when he is done.

This is a book about the year a bad man got to be good, and what it cost him to give it back.

Nominated for Georgia Author of the Year. Winner of the 2023 Readers' Favorite Award for Southern Fiction andthe 2023 BookFest Award for Domestic Thriller. This revised second edition is the definitive text.