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Those We Thought We Knew
- Narrated by: MacLeod Andrews
- Length: 9 hrs and 53 mins
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Those We Thought We Knew
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Publisher's Summary
Winner of the 2023 Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction
Winner of the 2023 Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award
One of Vanity Fair’s Favorite Books of 2023
“A beautifully fearless contemplation.”–S. A. Cosby
From award-winning writer David Joy comes a searing new novel about the cracks that form in a small North Carolina community and the evils that unfurl from its center.
Toya Gardner, a young Black artist from Atlanta, has returned to her ancestral home in the North Carolina mountains to trace her family history and complete her graduate thesis. But when she encounters a still-standing Confederate monument in the heart of town, she sets her sights on something bigger.
Meanwhile, local deputies find a man sleeping in the back of a station wagon and believe him to be nothing more than some slack-jawed drifter. Yet a search of the man’s vehicle reveals that he is a high-ranking member of the Klan, and the uncovering of a notebook filled with local names threatens to turn the mountain on end.
After two horrific crimes split the county apart, every soul must wrestle with deep and unspoken secrets that stretch back for generations. Those We Thought We Knew is an urgent unraveling of the dark underbelly of a community. Richly drawn and bracingly honest, it asks what happens when the people you’ve always known turn out to be monsters, what do you do when everything you ever believed crumbles away?
What the critics say
One of:
Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Best Southern Books of 2023
Garden & Gun’s Best Books for (and About) Southerners of 2023
BookRiot’s 10 Best Appalachian Books of 2023
CrimeReads's Most Anticipated Crime Fiction of Summer 2023
“[David Joy] is a man who sees his homeplace clearly and who writes like his hand was touched by God.”–The New York Times
“A refreshing departure…Joy has a knack for heightening intrigue…. He’s like a magician playing a shell game, and it’s an effective way to keep readers on their toes. The book is filled with gorgeous prose, particularly when Joy turns his considerable talents toward descriptions of the natural world.”–Atlanta Journal Constitution
“Unflinching and timely…Joy has mastered the high-stakes, page-turning Appalachian-noir style, and through this lens, the preconceived notions of life in the mountains are overturned.”–Christian Science Monitor
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What listeners say about Those We Thought We Knew
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Fraser Simons
- 2024-01-19
Well realized
This doesn’t exactly break ground, but it is quite good at what it does. When a black woman is murdered in a southern town, the story drills down into white fragility in a more nuanced way, far more than typical, but probably less so than similar books by PoC, I think. It’s pacey, got a twisty plot, and the prose are, as to be expected from Joy, a nice swingy range of straight forward and delicious specificity. Worth a read on its own, but the narrator was absolutely fantastic. The same person who did the new McCarthy books, if my ears do not lie.
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