Mudbound (2008) is the debut novel by American author Hillary Jordan. It has been translated into French, Italian, Serbian, Norwegian, Swedish, and Turkish and has sold more than 250,000 copies worldwide. The novel took Jordan seven years to write. She started it while studying for an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University. It was adapted as a 2017 film of the same title. Plot summary In the winter of 1946, Henry McAllen moves his city-bred wife, Laura, from their comfortable home in Memphis, Tennessee to a remote cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta—a place she finds both foreign and frightening. While Henry works the land he loves, Laura struggles to raise their two young daughters in a crude shack with no indoor plumbing or electricity, under the eye of her hateful, racist father-in-law. When it rains, the waters rise up and swallow the bridge to town, stranding the family in a sea of mud. As the McAllens are being tested in every way, two celebrated soldiers of World War II return home to the Delta. Jamie McAllen is everything his older brother Henry is not: charming, handsome, and sensitive to Laura’s plight, but also haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eldest son of the black tenant farmers who live on the McAllen farm, comes home from fighting the Nazis with the shine of a war hero, only to face far more personal—and dangerous—battles against the ingrained bigotry of his own countrymen. It is the unlikely friendship of these two brothers-in-arms, and the passions they arouse in others, that drive the novel to its tragic conclusion. Awards Won the 2006 Bellwether Prize for fiction, founded by author Barbara Kingsolver and awarded biennially to an unpublished work of fiction that addresses issues of social justice. Named as the 2008 'Fiction book of the Year' by the NAIBA (New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association) Won an Alex Award from the American Library Association in 2009 Long-listed for the 2010 International Dublin Literary Award In addition, this was one of twelve New Voices for 2008 chosen by Waterstones UK, ranked as one of the Top Ten Debut Novels of the Decade by Paste Magazine, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick, a Borders Original Voices selection, a Book Sense pick, a Richard & Judy New Writers Book Of The Month, and one of Indie Next's top ten reading group suggestions