Donnybrook: A Novel

A bareknuckle fighter must win a brutal tournament to feed his family in “a novel that guts the underbelly of southern Indiana”—now a major motion picture (Kirkus Reviews).The Donnybrook is a three-day bare-knuckle tournament held on a thousand-acre plot out in the sticks of southern Indiana. Twenty fighters. One wire-fence ring. Fight until only one man is left standing while a rowdy festival of onlookers—drunk and high on whatever’s on offer—bet on the fighters.Jarhead is a desperate man who’d do just about anything to feed his children. He’s also the toughest fighter in southeastern Kentucky, and he’s convinced that his ticket to a better life is one last fight with a cash prize so big it’ll solve all his problems. But he’ll have to face Chainsaw Angus—an undefeated fighter who recently got into cooking meth with his sister, Liz.As we travel through the backwoods to get to the Donnybrook, we meet a cast of nasty, ruined characters driven to all sorts of evil, all in the name of getting their fix—drugs, violence, sex, money, honor. Donnybrook is exactly the fearless, explosive, amphetamine-fueled debut novel you’d expect from the author of the feted and fearless story collection Crimes in Southern Indiana. Read more