HIGHER GROUND
BY
JAMES NOLAN
James Nolan's new novel, Higher Ground, won the Faulkner Society's gold medal
for Best Novel in 2008.
Higher Ground is a comic noir novel that begins five months after a hurricane has devastated New Orleans. Nicole Naquin, home for the first time in decades, is living next door to her mother Miss Gertie, an elderly evacuee from Lakeview reduced to pushing pills in a French Quarter gay bar. On the day Nicole’s brother is killed in a drive-by shooting, she crashes the car into her high-school sweetheart’s FEMA trailer, igniting a sexy romance among the ruins. Lieutenant Vinnie Panarello (who reappears from James Nolan’s Shamus-nominated story in New Orleans Noir) works at furious cross-purposes with hippie sleuth Gary Cherry to find the brother’s killer. This award-winning novel is a darkly satiric romp through a city fighting for its life, from the mayoral election to Mardi Gras, Lakeview to the French Quarter, the Garden District to Parish Prison. It’s a classic story of individual redemption amid collective destruction, one in which crooked politicians rule the day, leaving displaced home owners, bereaved mothers, drag queens, drug dealers, and illegal immigrants to band together for survival and justice. The real protagonist—the people of New Orleans—won’t be fooled any longer. As Miss Gertie says, “I’m moving to higher ground.”
PRAISE FOR HIGHER GROUND
In the frame of a page-turning noir, James Nolan has painted the most chillingly loving portrait of New Orleans. The city is the main character in a book otherwise filled with sharply drawn natives, from drag queens to Uptown matrons. Both the poetry and horror of post-Katrina New Orleans emanate from this story like a bouquet of carrion and jasmine. Nolan is the Baudelaire of the post-catastrophe city, who finds beauty in the swamp and generously grants us its fleurs du mal.
—Andrei Codrescu, NPR commentator and author of Whatever Gets You through the Night: A Story of Sheherezade and the Arabian Entertainments
—Julie Smith, author of the Skip Langdon mysteries, including New Orleans Mourning
If John Kennedy Toole had lived through the Katrina aftermath and could turn a phrase as well as James Nolan, he might have followed Confederacy of Dunces with something like Higher Ground. Read this and weep with laughter.
—Jed Horne, author of Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City
Like the indomitable city it celebrates, James Nolan's Higher Ground is lively, sensuous,
and hot.
—Valerie Martin, author of The Confessions of Edward Day and Mary Reilly
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Both grants are administered through the
Arts Council of New Orleans .
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