Devil Is Fine

By John Vercher
An artistic book cover featuring the title "devil is fine" in bold, uppercase letters with the author's name, john vercher, at the bottom. the background is cream-colored, adorned with an illustration of a jellyfish-like creature at the top, a patch of black textured material in the center, and elegant, swirling lines cascading downwards.
Author: John Vercher
ISBN: 9781250894489
ON SALE: 06/18/2024

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ISBN: 9781250894489
ISBN: 9781250894496
ISBN: 9781250350268
Hardcover

“FULL OF MYSTERY, MAGIC, DARK COMEDY, AND HEART.” ―Deesha Philyaw

“AN INTIMATE NOVEL, BY TURNS BRACING AND HILARIOUS.” ―Maurice Carlos Ruffin

“PROFOUNDLY MOVING.” ―Ben Fountain

“THE NOVEL’S FINAL PAGES WILL LEAVE YOU BREATHLESS.” ―Jonathan Escoffery

Still reeling from a sudden tragedy, our biracial narrator receives a letter from an attorney: he has just inherited a plot of land from his estranged white grandfather. He travels to a beach town several hours south of his home with the intention of selling the land immediately and moving on. But upon inspection, what lies beneath the dirt is far more complicated than he ever imagined. In a shocking irony, he is now the Black owner of a former plantation passed down by the men on his white mother’s side of the family.

Vercher deftly blurs the lines between real and imagined, past and present, tragedy and humor, and fathers and sons in this story of discovering and reclaiming a painful past. With the wit and rawness of Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, Devil Is Fine is a gripping, surreal, and brilliantly crafted dissection of the legacies we leave behind and those we inherit.

john vercher author
John Vercher lives in the Philadelphia region with his wife and two sons. He has a Bachelor’s in English from the University of Pittsburgh and an MFA in Creative Writing from the Mountainview Master of Fine Arts program. John serves as an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of English & Philosophy at Drexel University and was the inaugural Wilma Dykeman writer-in-residence at the University of North Carolina, Asheville. His debut novel, Three-Fifths, was named one of the best books of the year by the Chicago Tribune and Booklist. It was nominated for the Edgar and Strand Magazine Critics’ Awards for Best First Novel. His second novel, After the Lights Go Out, called “shrewd and explosive” by The New York Times, was named a Best Book of Summer 2022 by BookRiot and Publishers Weekly, and named a Booklist Editor’s Choice Best Book of 2022.

Praise for John Vercher

"Vercher’s novel is gut-wrenching, but he leavens it with some humor; one of the narrator’s fellow bar patrons calls him names like 'Colson Half-Whitehead' and 'Phony Morrison.' His prose is self-assured...It’s an intelligent book that never loses its heart."

Kirkus

"In the wrenching latest from Vercher, a struggling biracial writer reckons with his painful family history...Readers won't be able to look away."

Publishers Weekly

"Vercher (After the Lights Go Out, 2022) masterfully builds a haunting tale of grief, family secrets, and unacknowledged crimes of racism that inevitably resurface. With dark humor, psychological suspense, ghost-story elements, and echoes of Percival Everett's Erasure (the source of the film American Fiction), Devil Is Fine is a multilayered portrayal of one man’s struggle with his personal demons and a white society’s steadfast refusal to confront its own."

Booklist
starred review

"As arresting as it is propulsive, Devil is Fine plunges readers into every parents' worst nightmare, and asks, What do we owe to those we've failed? Vercher's rapid-fire insights on fatherhood, loss, and redemption are necessary reading. The novel's final pages will leave you breathless."

Jonathan Escoffery
Author of the Booker Prize finalist If I Survive You

“What makes John Vercher such a gorgeous, brilliant storyteller is his courage to disappear inside the ghosts he inherits and emerge from them with gifts that could save us. Defiant and tender-hearted, hilarious and terrifying, Devil Is Fine reimagines the narrator as the ultimate talisman. Vercher has created a marvel out of grief and hope.”

Sabrina Orah Mark
Award-winning author of Happily

"Devil is Fine is many things: part meditation, part fever dream, and part high-wire act that, somehow, Vercher executes flawlessly. Few have the imagination to write like this, and even fewer have the skill."

Jason Mott
Author of National Book Award winner Hell of a Book
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