Fiction January 1, 1

Lack is everywhere in All the Living. Lack of rain, lack of cash, lack of other, less tangible things. From the first pages of C. E. Morgan’s gripping, sensual debut novel, the contemporary Kentucky countryside sprawls into view. Into this void—silent, spectral, and chalky with dust— comes Aloma, whose bereaved lover, Orren, has inherited the family tobacco farm. To Aloma’s wary eye, the place and its contents are qualified by absence, human and otherwise. A fan hangs “spinless, trailing its cobwebs like old hair, its spiders gone,” the farmhouse is “empty-spacious,” the displaced dirt from the gravel drive is “loath to