Barry Hannah has long been considered one of the country's best living writers, whose singular voice and wicked genius for storytelling have earned him legions of diehard fans. Yonder Stands Your Orphan, his first novel in ten years, was hailed as the "welcome return of a brilliant writer" by The New York Times and Hannah as "the Big Daddy of Southern letters, the mendacity-battling Colossus" by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Yonder Stands Your Orphan opens with the establishment of an orphans' camp and the discovery of an abandoned car with two skeletons in the trunk. Man Mortimer, a pimp and casino pretty boy who resembles dead country singer Conway Twitty, has just been betrayed, and his revenge becomes a madness that will ravage the Mississippi community of Eagle Lake and give vent to his lifelong fascination with knives. The pompous young sheriff is useless at solving the crimes, so Mortimer's only challengers are three eccentric Christians -- a disgraced doctor and two ex-bikers, all prey to their addictions -- and an African-American Vietnam veteran whose wife is ill with cancer. Mortimer has a hold on each one of them -- a long-standing debt, a forgotten crime, or responsibilities they cannot yet desert. Yonder Stands Your Orphan paints a searing picture of the American South and establishes Barry Hannah once again as one of the most important writers in America. "A tour de force of dark humor ... eloquently twisted prose for which this southern Gothic master brooks no peer." -- Elle "A rare linguistic inventiveness ... seriously grappling with the relationship among suffering, mortality, and spirituality...." -- Brad Vice, San Francisco Chronicle "Hannah ... The best of his phrases can send you in opposite directions, make your ears warm." -- Scott W. Helman, The Boston Globe "Vintage Hannah, vivid and wry and insightful." -- William Porter, The Denver Post "... [Yonder Stands Your Orphan] is three hundred and thirty-six pages of supreme aesthetic bliss." -- Scott Morris, The Wall Street Journal "An apocalyptic ballad...." -- Sven Birkerts, Esquire