Fancy Gap
A Novel
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Feb 17, 2026
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A powerful, unforgettable debut: three estranged generations in Appalachia grapple with loss, poverty, and their individual demons, until an explosive climax brings them together in apocalyptic deliverance.
In the hills and isolated mountain enclaves of southern Appalachia, Nana Grace has left her own family behind to become the “Shepherd” of a disaffected flock of worshippers that she keeps in thrall through her charismatic preaching and the dispensing of stolen drugs.
Her daughter, Jane, struggles with breast cancer, the painful effects of its treatment, and the expectation to perform unceasing gratitude toward the evangelical community that reluctantly supports her out of a transactional sense of duty.
Jane's eldest son, Dalton, has been discharged from the army under conditions "Other than Honorable." Accused of breaching the military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy, Dalton drifts hesitantly home, pulled by guilt and love for his younger brother. Messy (christened Messiah at Grace’s insistence) is awkward in a world that attacks difference. Guided by faith, tortured by abandonment, Messy eventually develops a warped moral code shaped by alienation and anger.
Fancy Gap is an unflinching look at the desperation that throws kerosene on the flames of opioid use, poverty, illness, and apocalyptic Christianity. Profound and captivating, violent and lyrical, it introduces Zak Jones as a compelling and original new voice in Canadian literature.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This dark, unnerving novel burns like a fuse. In the Appalachian hills of the North Carolina–Virginia border, two brothers are struggling to survive in a family that’s falling apart. Dalton has just been thrown out of the army. His teenage brother, Messy—short for Messiah—is lonely and dangerously adrift. Their mother is dying of breast cancer, and their grandmother has abandoned the family to lead a cultlike congregation she controls through charismatic proclamations and stolen pills. In this landscape riddled with economic ruin, drug addiction, rival churches, and extremist politics, we could feel that something terrible was on its way. Debut novelist Zak Jones chronicles this instability in spare and deliberate prose, without a trace of condescension or sentimentality. The short, sharp chapters pull you deeper and deeper in, toward a climax that somehow feels both inevitable and shocking. Fancy Gap is a harrowing portrait of a family—and a place—on the edge.
