Black Road - Paperback

by Nancy Zafris (Author)

Black Road unfolds in a small Ohio town, with one high school and one celebrated football team and one jumbo marching band. When the bad-boy star quarterback and his friends go too far one night with one of their pranks, a car crash severely injures two other students. The consequences of the crash and the court trials that follow reverberate through the town, reaching beyond the local community in haunting, almost surreal ways as the larger world seems to be turned upside down.

As the details leading up to the crash are revealed bit by bit, a surprising number of people are implicated the outsider teenager who lives alone in a trailer next to the Amish farm where the crash happened; a high school teacher who fights to bring goodness and beauty to young lives; an Indian doctor and her school-aged daughter who hopes to follow her brother to Harvard; a Japanese exchange student.

Watching from behind everything is an actual Greek chorus broken loose in time, Apollo and Artemis, lost souls trekking through the modern world

Author Biography

Nancy Zafris published four previous books of fiction: The People I Know, winner of the Flannery O'Connor award for short fiction and the Ohioana Library Association award for best book of fiction; The Metal Shredders, a New York Times Notable Book; Lucky Strike; and Home Jar, a collection of short stories named one of the year's ten best books by The Minneapolis Star Tribune. In addition to her own work, Zafris long served as the series editor for the annual Flannery O'Connor Award for short fiction. Prior to that she served as the fiction editor of the Kenyon Review. She also was instrumental in developing the generative model for the Kenyon Summer Writers Workshops, where summer after summer she led sessions in fiction writing.