WINNER OF THE WILLIE MORRIS AWARD FOR SOUTHERN WRITING - FICTION
“Jamie Quatro is a writer of sinuous, muscular power and grace.Two-Step Devilis a starkly gorgeous story of God and loss and art and love, and her best book yet.” —Lauren Groff
From aNew York TimesNotable “writer of great originality” comes a bold new novel about love, faith and two societal outsiders whose lives converge in the contemporary American South
The “fearless” (New Yorker) author ofI Want to Show You MoreandFire Sermon—whose recently published stories inThe New YorkerandThe Paris Reviewhave brought her new attention—is known for her sharp, seductive prose and masterful exploration of the divine and the carnal in daily life. InTwo-Step Devil, Quatro delivers a striking and formally inventive story of the unlikely relationship between two strangers on the margins of society and the shadowy forces that threaten their futures.
In 2014, in Lookout Mountain, Alabama, the Prophet—a seventy-year-old man who paints his visions—lives off the grid in a cabin near the Georgia border. While scrounging for materials at the local scrapyard, the Prophet sees a car pull up to an abandoned gas station. In the back seat is a teenage girl with zip ties on her wrists, a girl he realizes he must rescue from her current life. Her name is Michael, and the Prophet feels certain that she is a messenger sent by God to take his end-time warnings to the White House. Michael finds herself in the Prophet’s remote, art-filled cabin, and as their uncertain dynamic evolves into tender friendship, she is offered a surprising opportunity to escape her past—and perhaps change her future.
Moving through the worlds of the Prophet, the girl, and a beguiling devil figure who dances in the corner of their lives,Two-Step Devilis a propulsive, philosophical examination of fate and faith that dares to ask what salvation, if any, can be found in our modern world.
US Jamie Quatrois theNew York TimesNotable author ofI Want to Show You More, a finalist for theLos Angeles TimesArt Seidenbaum Award and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, andFire Sermon, a Book of the Year for theEconomist,San Francisco Chronicle,LitHub,Bloomberg, and theTimes Literary Supplement. Quatro’s fiction has appeared inThe New Yorker,The Paris Review, theNew York Review of BooksandPloughshares. She is the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, and Maison Dora Maar, and teaches in the Sewanee School of Letters MFA program. Quatro lives with her family in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Praise forTwo-Step Devil
Winner of the Willie Morris Award for Southern Writing - Fiction
An American Library Association Notable Book of the Year
ANew York Times Book ReviewEditors’ Choice
A Best Book of the Year fromThe Paris Reviewand theAtlanta Journal Constitution
A Most Anticipated Book of 2024 fromLiterary Hub
“Just as the Prophet makes art out of detritus, Quatro alchemizes gloomy subject matter—sexual abuse, terminal disease, mental illness, poverty, suicide and American decay—into transcendent beauty . . . Quatro writes with the musicality and command of a mystic poet. Her sentences are also propulsive; the novel is a page-turner that leaves readers feeling deeply invested in the fates of the Prophet and Michael, individually and together . . . Theologically avant-garde and emotionally supple,Two-Step Devilis a Southern Gothic novel for fans of Denis Johnson, Frank Stanford and Wendell Berry, infused with the genre’s requisite imagery of ‘thick blankets of kudz
