It’s 1939, and the federal government has sent USDA agent Virginia Furman into the North Carolina mountains to instruct families on modernizing their homes and farms.
There she meets farm wife Irenie Lambey, who is immediately drawn to the lady agent’s self-possession. Already, cracks are emerging in Irenie’s fragile marriage to Brodis, an ex-logger turned fundamentalist preacher: She has taken to night ramblings through the woods to escape her husband’s bed, storing strange keepsakes in a mountain cavern. To Brodis, these are all the signs that Irenie—tiptoeing through the dark in her billowing white nightshirt—is practicing black magic.
When Irenie slips back into bed with a kind of supernatural stealth, Brodis senses that a certain evil has entered his life, linked to the lady agent, or perhaps to other, more sinister forces.
Working in the stylistic terrain of Amy Greene and Bonnie Jo Campbell, this mesmerizing debut by Julia Franks is the story of a woman intrigued by the possibility of change, escape, and reproductive choice—stalked by a Bible-haunted man who fears his government and stakes his integrity upon an older way of life. As Brodis chases his demons, he brings about a final act of violence that shakes the entire valley. In this spellbinding Southern story, Franks bares the myths and mysteries that modernity can’t quite dispel.
Winner of the 2018 Townsend Prize for Best Georgia Fiction
Winner of the Thomas Wolfe Award
Winner of 2017 IPPY Gold in Literary Fiction
Winner of the Southern Book Prize
Winner of Georgia Author of the Year in Literary Fiction
A Chicago Review of Books Best Fiction of 2016
A Bustle Great Appalachian Novel
An Atlanta Journal Constitution Best Southern Books of 2016
A Women’s National Book Association’s choice for National Reading Group Month
A Bitter Southerner’s 2016 Summer Reading Roundup recommendation
A Southern Living Reading Recommendation
A Knoxville Tennessean’s Hot Read
A Southern Independent Booksellers Association’s Okra Pick
Finalist for the 2016 Crooks Corner Prize
Carmen Maria Machado for NPR: “A spellbinding story of witchcraft and disobedience.”
Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried: “An absorbing human drama of marital discontent, misunderstanding, violence, and desperation. What a spellbinding, convincing, and completely satisfying novel this is!”
Charles Frazier, author of Cold Mountain: “Julia Franks writes wonderfully and knowledgeably about nature, with a fine eye for the textures of the physical world. Her ear for the diction and rhythms and creativity of Southern mountain speech delights on every page.”
Peter Heller for The Week: Franks “startles her readers into a vivid awareness of the life around them and of their own magic as sentient creatures. Franks knows the scent of damp earth under plow, the touch of sap on a cold tree, and how to write about men who cannot countenance the wildness of women.”
Dannye Romine Powell’s for the Charlotte Observer:“Man oh man. There’s writing and then there’s writing. Pick up Julia Franks’ debut novel Over the Plain Houses, turn to any page, and you just have to give in to whimpers as you read.”
Atlanta Journal Constitution: “This book seems like it may have taken 240 years to write. At its best, which is all the time, it summons the smoke-swirling wilderness…. The startling images she retrieves conjure geologic time…. Franks’ mastery of technical details is daunting.”
NPR: “This beautifully written and carefully researched novel examines what happens when the women who "belong" to men get a taste of freedom, and it explores the complex way nascent feminism and accusations of witchcraft were historically entwined with each other.”
Knoxville News Sentinel: “This novel cannot be reduced to its treatment of the Depression, or of women's issues, any more than Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain could be called simply a Civil War novel. Over the Plain Houses captures elemental emotions.”
The Thomas Wolfe Award Committee: “A stunning debut novel set profoundly in depression-era Western North Carolina that focuses on the familial and communal conflict that arises out of a man’s utter commitment to fundamentalist religion. Without being the least bit sentimental or giving in to any stereotypes about Appalachian people, it tells an utterly compelling story that is deeply rooted in place. In addition, her detailed, nuanced, and poetic observations of farm life and logging educate the reader while rounding out the setting for this affecting work of art. To some panelists the novel was reminiscent of the best prose of Ron Rash and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.”
Indie Next: “Tense and atmospheric, this novel is set in Depression-era North Carolina but confronts a number of issues that are relevant today.….The book brilliantly takes readers back to a bygone era while subtly showing that it is an era whose darkness could soon fall again.”
Chicago Review of Books: “This small-press gem…is filled with the most beautiful prose I read this year, and is surely one of the most confident, mature debut novels of the century so far. It’s like The Witch meets Ron Rash—a gorgeous, creepy Southern Gothic tale set in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina at the tail end of the Great Depression. The sense of place is visceral, and the characterization is masterful.”
Smoky Mountain News: “Not since Cold Mountain, Cataloochee or Serena have I read such convincing and transporting Appalachian prose, where so much attention is paid to surroundings, landscapes. In Plain Houses, Franks’ characters stand amidst a landscape that is sometimes even more important than what they say or do. A sublime achievement.”
Susan Tekulve for Appalachian Heritage: “Breathtaking…. A combustible tale about the conflicts that arise when the past meets the future. It is about the collisions that occur when outsiders—even the well-meaning ones—impose changes upon insiders.”
Amy Greene, author of Long Man and Bloodroot: “As Southern Appalachian women, we need to tell our own stories, and Julia Franks does this in prose as starkly beautiful as the Depression-era mountain landscape her characters inhabit.”
Robert Bausch, author Far as the Eye Can See: “Every now and then you find a book that is so enthralling and live with characters that when it begins to build suspense you find yourself breathless as you read. The story unfolds and moves like an express train. This one is a winner!”
Kim Church, author of Byrd: “The best historical fiction conjures the past while speaking to the present. Over the Plain Houses is an absorbing, twisty, suspenseful story of a couple’s rupturing marriage in a time and place wracked by change.”
Michelle Wildgen, author of You’re Not You: “In Julia Franks’ hands this story about a marriage and a place expands beyond all confines and into something as gripping and as haunting as a fever dream.”
Andrew Plattner for the Georgia Author of the Year Committee: “This is a wonderful book….Over the Plain Houses is worthy of both our wonder and our admiration.”
Anjali Enjeti in Atlanta Magazine: “Electrifying…. Franks’s chilling prose evokes rural Southerners’ isolation and distrust of outsiders, and the dangers inherent in a woman’s desire to flee her marriage and control her own body.”
Electric Lit: “Dealing with such issues as the government’s role in the lives of individuals, the responsibility of humans toward the environment, and the place of women within their communities, the book feels at times remarkably contemporary.”
Foreword Magazine: “In this captivating historical novel, full of superstition, suspense, and secrets, a woman comes to a North Carolina town and rocks the precarious equilibrium of the relationships there.”
ArtATL's Gail O'Neill on WABE Radio: “A study of how one couple navigates a power-shift in their relationship. And it takes on the complexity of religion without getting preachy.”
ArtsATL: “It is impossible for me to imagine the world without this character….She is so familiar to me; I have been her. We have all been her, somewhere along the way.”
Frank Stacio interviews Julia Franks on The State of Things: “Eight years ago, Julia Franks and her husband bought a farm in western North Carolina. At the time, the 1800s farmhouse on the land was still standing and when they walked in the doors, they were greeted by dozens of odd artifacts, including animal bones, locks of hair, insect hives, and even a jar with a fingernail in it.”
Southern Literary Review: “Mesmerizing.”