The Lost and the Blind — Curtis Smith

Mark Hayes has come up hard. Poverty. Chaos. Hunger. His mother a junkie. His father serving a life sentence. But as his senior year looms, Mark finds a bit of peace with his mother and her girlfriend in a farmhouse outside town. Here, he hopes to escape the upheaval that has dogged him since the day he was born, but as hard as he tries, he can't outrun his shadows. He is lost, but no more so than many of his friends, no more so than the institutions he navigates or his country as it spirals toward another bloody war. Mark doesn't know God, but as he stumbles through his long, violent night, he is guided by glimmers of kindness, the good souls who reach out to this life's lost sheep. Delivered in prose both terse and lyrical, The Lost and the Blind presents a searing portrait of dopesick, small-town America and a young man desperate to rise above.