Birmingham, 35 Miles

December 17, 2007
Set in a near-future Alabama rendered virtually lifeless by a hole in the ozone layer, Braziel’s relentlessly dark debut focuses on Mathew Harrison, a young man who’s never known anything but dust storms, heat, the killing sun and a life of migrant labor. Forbidden to move north (the nearby city of Birmingham is closed), Mat, his father and their peers labor in government-run clay mines that may be nothing more than hideously dangerous make-work. Cut off from communication with the so-called Saved World, the undestroyed part of the country, they’re treated much like the Okies of the dust bowl era. Grown to adulthood in this soul-destroying environment, Mat nonetheless finds joy in his marriage to a local girl, Jennifer. The young couple are among the favored few who have acquired visas, a way out of the hellhole of the dead South. Poetic, grim and hallucinatory, this harrowing work is not for the faint of heart, though it will appeal strongly to anyone who loved Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
.