We are please to announce the latest novel by Mark Powell, Hurricane Season, a tragic love story of a broken MMA star, a disgraced doctor, and a struggle with addiction and faith.
What to Expect inside…
Shy Walsh might be the greatest female fighter of her time, but a loss in a Vegas title fight, and the sneaking suspicion that she wanted to lose, sends her reeling back to her Central Florida home and her dying mother. She needs some perspective, she needs to pull herself together. But one day she meets Thomas Clayton, a doctor recently released from prison, and everything changes. They fall in love, maybe, but Tommy has his own demons, and what begins as an attempt to build a life together quickly devolves into a criminal enterprise that spans the state. Helpless in the face of addiction and guilt, and, most especially, the peculiar brokenness of being American in the 21st Century, Shy and Tommy descend into a nightmare existence of crime and isolation.
Hurricane Season is a noir thriller about fighting and addiction, prison and drugs; but more than that, it is a love story set in the carnage of an America wrecked by inequality.
What folks are saying…
“Brutal and poetic, Mark Powell’s story will retune your heart strings, you’ll begin with a triple-espresso and end with triple-shots of Kentucky bourbon and no chaser, its a smooth burn.”
—Frank Bill, author of Back to the Dirt
“In Hurricane Season Mark Powell writes about the places where America happens – its hospitals, prisons, fighting gyms, and roadside motels. This is an indispensable work of fiction about the contemporary South in all its tragic complexities. A book brimming with heart, as propulsive as it is wise.”
—Caleb Johnson, author of Treeborne
About the Author
Mark Powell is the author of seven previous novels including Small Treasons (2017, Gallery/Simon and Schuster), and Lioness (2022, WVU Press). He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Breadloaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, and twice from the Fulbright Foundation to Slovakia and Romania. He directs the creative writing program at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC. Prior to ASU, he lived in Florida for eight years where he taught at Stetson University while running a prison writing program.
