Kind One

The powerful antebellum tale of three women and their evolving relationship as master, sister, friend, and captive.

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 Lancaster’s “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 Lancaster’s attentions turn to them, and she finds herself torn between her husband and only companions. The events that follow Lancaster’s 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.

Publication date: September 25, 2012

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 5 x 7.4

Page count: 192 pages

ISBN: 9781566893114

Called “one of the most talented young writers on the American scene today” by Paul Auster, Laird Hunt is the author of five genre-bending novels: The Impossibly, The Exquisite, Indiana, Indiana, Ray of the Star, and Kind One. His books have been translated and released in France, Italy, and Japan, and The Impossibly is available as an audio book through Iambik Audio. His work has also appeared in several recent anthologies including Noise: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth, in which the Village Voice says “Laird Hunt’s ‘Kissability,’ in its distillation of inchoate teenage longing, is . . . as lovely a passage as anything in pop music.”

Born in Singapore and educated at Indiana University and The Sorbonne in Paris, Hunt has also lived in Tokyo, London, The Hague, New York City, and on an Indiana farm. A former press officer at the United Nations and current faculty member at the University of Denver, he now lives in Boulder, Colorado.

Winner of the 2013 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award

Finalist for 2013 PEN/Faulkner Award

“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

“[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

“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.” 

—Michael Ondaatje

“A profound meditation on the sexual and racial subconscious of America. Nothing is sacred here.” 

—Danzy Senna

“It is as devastating a piece of writing as anything one is likely to find in contemporary literature.” 

—Contemporary Review of Fiction

“Profoundly imaginative, strikingly original, deeply moving.” 

—Kirkus, starred review

“The novel reveals how slavery was so pernicious as to make criminals of everyone who owned slaves, and how redemption is rarely a neatly contained process.” 

—Refinery 29

“Hunt has an ear for dialect, and the story itself reads like Faulkner mixed with Raymond Carver, while remaining recognizably Hunt’s own.”

—Shelf Awareness

“A mesmerizing novel of sin and expiation that plumbs the depths of human depravity and despair, yet hints at the possibility of redemption.” 

—The Star Tribune

“Laird Hunt has written a masterpiece of haunt, a balanced and jarring book that takes all we know of the south, down to its most innocent elements, down even to the daisies of the fields, and creates their scarred histories anew.” 

—The Rumpus

“A major achievement for Hunt . . . in its study of the perpetuation of violence, it calls to mind Faulkner’s structures by way of Albert Camus and the dark dreamscapes of Jean Cocteau.”

—The Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Laird Hunt is one of the more criminally overlooked novelists writing today, and this is probably the most accessible and completely realized of his books.”

—Time Out New York