JENNIFER PASHLEY reads from her new novel THE SCAMP

The Scamp (Tin House Books)

 Rayelle Reed can’t escape in her small town, where everyone knows everything and not enough: All the guys she slept with, but not the ones she loved. The baby she had out of wedlock with the pastor’s son, and how the baby died, but not the grief and guilt that consume her. At a motel bar, Rayelle meets Couper Gale, a freelance detective on a mission to investigate a rash of missing girls, and she tags along as an excuse to cross the state line. But when Couper’s investigation leads them to the mystery surrounding Rayelle’s runaway cousin, Khaki, she finds she is heading straight back into everything she was hoping to leave behind. As fates become entwined, Rayelle must follow a haunted and twisted path—leading her toward a collision where loyalties will be betrayed, memories uncovered, and family bonds shattered. 

Unflinchingly dark and compelling, The Scamp confronts head-on the issues of family origins and the bonds between mothers, daughters, and sisters. In Pashley’s hands, the lost girls of rural and industrial America, trapped in the unforgiving systems of government assistance and single parenthood, are portrayed with depth and nuance. She exposes the ingrained poverty and atmosphere of disillusionment that damns them before they have a chance and she gives them a ray of hope for a better life ahead.

Praise for The Scamp

“Jennifer Pashley’s stunning debut novel is wonderfully colorful and dangerous, following a tough, savvy narrator on a perilous trek toward release from a messy and difficult life, a dead child, a troubled and troubling family. Rayelle Reed mixes it up with and draws sustenance from a motley crew of slightly and more-than-slightly off-center characters, each of whom, in his or her way, adds richness and complexity to the hunt. Pashley writes like an angel who has spent time in parts South, figuratively and literally, and the pleasures of reading her are rich and satisfying.” —Frederick Barthelme, author of There Must Be Some Mistake

“Precise. Blunt. Funny. Scary. Bleak. An inviting and well-carved debut.” —Aimee Bender, author of The Color Master

“These stories, like the characters who inhabit them, are tough-skinned and tender-hearted, and wickedly funny, as only the broken can be. Jennifer Pashley is the real conjurer here, pulling beauty from the despairs of ordinary people, splitting the skin of everyday tragedies, of people whose hearts have been ravaged and whose hands have done hurting, to reveal the hot pulsing hope in them, in all of us.” —Melissa Febos, author of Whip Smart

“Gritty, seductive, and completely mesmerizing, Jennifer Pashley’s . . . novel limns a trail of broken relationships, broken bones, and broken promises. Be warned: these characters bloom so large on the page, you’ll ignore the real world around you until the last tangled secret has been unraveled.” —Shanna Mahin, author of Oh! You Pretty Things

"The Scamp is knife and velvet, tongue and bone. Its pages smell of pool water, trailer sex, and huffed gasoline; they taste of reservation cigarettes and peaches from the can. Jennifer Pashley tells the brutal, elegiac story of two girls on the move: broken, burning, and so dangerously beautiful." —Dylan Landis, author of Rainey Royal

Raised in Syracuse, New York, by an accordion virtuoso and a casket maker, Jennifer Pashley is the author of two short story collections, States and The Conjurer. Her stories have appeared widely, in journals like Mississippi Review, PANK, and SmokeLong Quarterly, and she has been awarded the Red Hen Prize for Fiction, the Mississippi Review Prize for fiction, and the Carve Magazine Esoteric Award for LGBT Fiction.