Desperation Road : Now a Major film release 2023

"Michael Farris Smith is one of the best writers of his generation, and this very well may be his best work" — Tom Franklin

In the vein of Daniel Woodrell's Winter's Bone and the works of Ron Rash, Desperation Road is set in a rough-and-tumble Mississippi town where drugs, whiskey, guns, and the desire for revenge violently intersect and collide.

For eleven years, the clock had been ticking for Russell Gaines as he sat in Parchman Penitentiary in the Mississippi Delta.

His time now up, and believing his debt paid, he returns home only to discover that revenge lives and breathes all around.

On the day of his release, a woman named Maben and her young daughter trudge along the side of the interstate under the punishing summer sun.

Desperate and exhausted, the pair spend their last dollar on a motel room for the night, a night that ends with Maben running through the darkness holding a pistol, and a dead deputy sprawled across the road in the glow of his own headlights.

With dawn, destinies collide, and Gaines is forced to decide whose life he will save — his own, or those of the woman and child?

Desperation Road is a gripping, guttural thriller of redemption and human frailty. It is due to be turned into a film of the same title starring Mel Gibson.

Praise for Desperation Road:

"Smith is a meticulous craftsman who evokes his protagonists and their world with patience and subtlety" — Publishers Weekly

"Outstanding" — Ron Rash

"As rich and alive and wounded as any you'll find in contemporary fiction" — Wiley Cash

"Both poetic and brutal, Desperation Road is a gorgeous and violent book." — Ivy Pochoda



Michael Farris Smith is the award-winning author of Salvage This World, NICK, Blackwood, The Fighter, Desperation Road, Rivers, and The Hands of Strangers. His novels have appeared on Best of the Year lists with Esquire, NPR, Southern Living, Garden & Gun, Book Riot and numerous other outlets, and have been named Indie Next, Barnes & Noble Discover, and Amazon Best of the Month selections. He has also written the feature-film adaptations of his novels Desperation Road and The Fighter, titled for the screen as Rumble Through the Dark. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with his wife and daughters.



'This is just stunning ... Little short of perfection ... Think Daniel Woodrell, Bill Beverly and Lou Berney for starters and that will give you an idea of the style, the range and the humanity of the novel'



'A harsh but beautiful thriller that has you cheering under your breath for its wounded, fallible protagonist throughout'



'Flickers with poetic splendour... Repetitions, the falling cadences of country music, phrases strung together in long passages of sustained beauty: it's rare for desperation to be rendered with such intensity'



'a wonderfully evoked and deeply touching work'



'Michael Farris Smith's prose focuses on small details and has a rhythm that gives it a poetic quality; a comparison with Annie Proulx is not overly enthusiastic'