Chris Offutt at Octavia Books

Octavia Books will host Chris Offutt at 6 p.m. on Monday, April 9, at their storefront (513 Octavia Street). Offutt will be celebrating the launch of his new novel, COUNTRY DARK, his long-awaited return to fiction after nearly two decades,

COUNTRY DARK is a fierce noir-inflected novel about a good man pushed by circumstance into crime.

Tucker, a young veteran, returns home from the Korean War and finds work running moonshine through the hills and hollows of Eastern Kentucky for an overweight bootlegger who goes by the name of Beanpole. Tucker falls in love and starts a family, and though the Tuckers are beset by hard luck and poverty, they maintain a fierce love of their home and each other. When the state threatens his to take away his children, Tucker is compelled to violence and the consequences of his actions begin to close in around him.