With Live Music by Bill Payne, Bobby Doolittle, and Nancy McCurry

In the rural South, a retired colonel in an upscale retirement community grieves the sudden death of his wife on the tennis court. On the other side of the highway, an elderly Black woman grieves the murder of her niece by a white man. Between them lies an abandoned field where three centuries of crimes are hidden, and only she knows the explosive secrets buried there. When the colonel runs into her car, causing a surprising amount of damage, it sparks a feud that sets loose the spirits in the Field, both benevolent and vengeful. In prose that’s been called “dazzling” and “mesmerizing,” in the animated voices of trees and birds and people, in Southern-voiced storytelling as deeply layered as that of Pat Conroy, Marjorie Hudson lays out the boundaries of a field that contains the soul of the South, and leads us to a day of reckoning.

"Indigo Field brims with multigenerational drama, earthy spirituality, and deeply imagined characters you are unlikely to forget. In tightly compressed, poetic language, Hudson weaves a mesmerizing story of loss, injustice, and revenge conspiring to darken the human heart—and the redemptive and unexpected ways the light comes in."

—Sue Monk Kidd, author of The Invention of Wings, The Book of Longings, and The Secret Life of Bees
 

"Indigo Field gives us genius in the ancient sense of that word—the spirit animating a place. Marjorie Hudson is a spiritual geographer, charting the landscape of a changing Carolina community and its intertwined lives, past and present, Black and white, rich and poor. The ancient pines on Gooley Ridge overlook Indian burials and bank foreclosures, bird and people migrations, secret murders and delayed vengeance, sweet love scenes and brutal assaults. Like Pat Conroy before her, Hudson writes up a mighty storm in this moving and satisfying novel." —Dale Neal, author of Appalachian Book of the Dead
 

"Marjorie Hudson’s stunning debut novel, Indigo Field, conjures a world anchored in the people and soil of the 'land between two rivers' in North Carolina. Like the deep roots of the ancient Gooley Pines know the depths of this soil, only one elder knows the depths and connections of history, love, and tragedy concealed in this blood-soaked abandoned field. Revealed here in lush, evocative prose and unforgettable characters, Hudson’s tale intertwines old dispossessions with new losses, upscale retirees with longtime farmers, Black with White, foolish ignorance with startling revelation. As storytelling peels back each layer of history and memory, and present-time lives are called to acts of vengeance or courage, a wise woman reminds, 'There are moments in life in when everything you do makes a difference.' This novel brings a reckoning, now face-to-face, for the unspoken rage of the dispossessed. It is a book of Old Testament wrath and New Testament forgiveness, and the storm that’s coming bears more on its winds than any weather forecast can foresee. A magnificent, magical debut." —Valerie Nieman, author of In the Lonely Backwater and To the Bones