title: The Current That Carries: Stories (Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction Ser.)
author: Lisa Graley
description: A subtle, powerful portrait of the strength and limits of human connectedness. (<i>Kirkus Reviews</i>)<br /><br /><i>The Current That Carries </i>is profoundly in touch with the ways the world can reveal transcendent grace through the simplest things, the humblest things, even in the quotidian clutter of modern life and culture. These are ravishingly beautiful stories. Lisa Graley is truly an important new writer. Flannery OConnor would have loved her sensibility, would have loved this book. (Robert Olen Butler <i>author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain</i>)<br /><br />In this powerful and engaging debut collection <i>The Current That Carries</i>, Lisa Graley writes knowingly and powerfully about the nature of family in the rural world of small towns, as people struggle to take hard care of each other . . . and their animals. The stubborn hope living here is strongly reminiscent of the stories of Annie Proulx: All these lives ator nearthe end of the road reluctantly offering up their secrets. (Ron Carlson <i>author of Return to Oakpine</i>)<br /><br />From a grandmother who writes a letter to Ron Howard imploring him to direct a movie about a community tragedy, to a son who discovers a tractor mysteriously buried in his recently deceased fathers grave, to a beloved goat that appears as a ghost to a man living out his last days, you will be surprised and enthralled by the terrain covered in <i>The Current That Carries. </i>Lisa<i> </i>Graley writes with compassion, empathy, and a deep understanding of characters struggling with identities and responsibilities, or simply with staying alive. These powerful and honest stories not only examine the fragility of the human body but, more importantly, the resilience of the human heart. (Karin Lin-Greenberg <i>author of Faulty Predictions</i>)
zlib_text: Val McDermid is a No.1 bestseller whose novels have been translated into more
  than thirty languages, and have sold over fifteen million copies. She has won
  many awards internationally, including the CWA Gold Dagger for best crime
  novel of the year and the _LA Times_ Book of the Year Award. She was inducted
  into the ITV3 Crime Thriller Awards Hall of Fame in 2009, was the recipient of
  the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger in 2010 and received the Lambda Literary
  Foundation Pioneer Award in 2011. In 2016, Val received the Outstanding
  Contribution to Crime Fiction Award at the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime
  Writing Festival and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
  In 2017, she received the DIVA Literary Prize for Crime. She writes full time
  and divides her time between Cheshire and Edinburgh.
  
  **Also by Val McDermid**
  
   _A Place of Execution_
  
   _Killing the Shadows_
  
   _The Distant Echo_
  
   _The Grave Tattoo_
  
   _A Darker Domain_
  
   _Trick of the Dark_
  
   _The Vanishing Point_
  
  TON