As a teenage girl, Ginny marries Linus Lancaster, her mother's second cousin, and moves to his Kentucky pig farm "ninety miles from nowhere." In the shadows of the lush Kentucky landscape, Ginny discovers the empty promises of Linus' "paradise"--a place where the charms of her husband fall away to reveal a troubled man and cruel slave owner. Ginny befriends the young slaves Cleome and Zinnia who work at the farm--until Linus' attentions turn to them, and she finds herself torn between her husband and only companions. The events that follow Linus' death change all three women for life. Haunting, chilling, and suspenseful, Kind One is a powerful tale of redemption and human endurance in antebellum America.
"[Kind One] contains the sort of story that needs to be experienced directly . . . you should get a hold of a copy and read it for yourself as soon as you can."
Andrew Wille
"This compact but reverberant 19th-century tale tracks a circle of hard-luck souls whose collective tears could fill a dry well . . . Hunt passes the narration among the principle characters in woozily nonlinear fashion, lending a range of textures to this antebellum melodrama."
The New York Times Book Review "Fiction Chronicle"
"There is always a surprise in the voice and in the heart of Laird Hunt's stories--with its echoes of habit caught in a timeless dialect, so we see the world he gives us as if new. 'You hear something like that and it walks out the door with you.'"
