When Ruby awoke on her tenth birthday, something about her has changed. Something alarming enough to make her parents lock her in the garage and call the police. Then she was sent to Thurmond, a brutal government "rehabilitation camp." Now at age sixteen, Ruby is one of the dangerous ones.

In a minimum security federal prison, home to drug dealers, swindlers, and tax evaders, three former judges meet each day to write briefs, handle cases for other inmates, and dispense jailhouse justice. They also spend hours hatching schemes to make money. When one of their schemes goes awry, snaring an innocent on the outside, the Brethren's days of quietly marking time are over.

"A searing and profound Southern odyssey by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward. In Jesmyn Ward's first novel since her National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. Drawing on Morrison and Faulkner, The Odyssey and the Old Testament, Ward gives us an epochal story, a journey through Mississippi's past and present that is both an intimate portrait...

"Luka Kane has spent 736 days wrongfully imprisoned inside the Loop awaiting his execution. Each day is the same. Each day is torturous. But things are starting to change. Whispers of war are circulating. Strange things are happening to the prisoners. And the warden delivers a message: Luka, you have to get out ... Now Luka must decide whether breaking out of the Loop is his only way to survive, especially if there's any chance of saving the ones...