Fire Exit

Best-selling and award-winning Talty (Night of the Living Rez) writes another unforgettable story of family, inheritance, and culture, set on the Penobscot Reservation. Charles Lamosway is a complex man with some shocking dilemmas. He has fathered a child, Elizabeth, in secret and wants to tell her about her heritage and the truth of her being but doesn’t want to go against the wishes of her mother, who has since remarried and is claiming that her new husband is Elizabeth’s father. Charles is also trying to come to terms with his own mother’s rapidly developing dementia. They only have so much time before her history is lost forever. Doesn’t Elizabeth have the right to hear that history or meet her grandmother? Talty delves deep into the nuance of federal laws surrounding the governance, residency requirements, and jurisdiction of Indigenous reservations in the United States, specifically regarding blood quantum. The novel is fantastically narrated by Darrell Dennis, whose nuance and care are evident in his telling of Charles’s story.