Gun Love

**Longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction 2018** Haunting ... poetic ... Full of sorrow and aching sweetness Washington Post Gun Love is a hypnotic story of family, community and violence. Told from the perspective of a sharp-eyed teenager, it exposes America s love affair with firearms and its painful consequences. My mother called anyone or anything that seemed alone, or ended up in the wrong place, a stray. There were stray people, stray dogs, stray bullets, and stray butterflies. Fourteen-year-old Pearl France lives in the front seat of a broken down car and her mother Margot lives in the back. Together they survive on a diet of powdered milk and bug spray, love songs and stolen cigarettes. Life on the edge of a Florida trailer park is strange enough, but when Pastor Rex s Guns for God programme brings Eli Redmond to town Pearl s world is upended. Eli pays regular visits to Margot in the back seat, forcing Pearl to find a world beyond the car. Margot is given a gift by Eli, a gun of her own, just like he s given her flowers. It sits under the driver s seat, a dark presence One of those rare books that the reader might wish to be a few dozen pages longer, to spend more time in this fully realised world Observer