“…His sixth novel takes a surreal, Joycean narrative journey through contemporary North Carolina.” (Read More)
— North Carolina Literary Review
“An unorthodox but compelling cry against racist violence.” (Read More)
“The author conjures a slew of colorful characters and probes below the surface…with an eye for the spiritual and magical.” (Read More)
“The author asks his reader to dwell upon and feel the unspeakable and often devastating realities that the human experience brings.” (Read More)
“One Kind Favor is a wildly original and deliciously subversive novel, told with profound intelligence and free-wheeling wit.” (Read More)
Kevin McIlvoy’s gripping One Kind Favor haunted me long after I turned the last page. Based loosely on a tragic real-life incident, the book explores the consequences of the lynching of a young black man in rural North Carolina. McIlvoy bravely sets forth a suspenseful story that tackles racial violence, police indifference, and the cost of justice in contemporary American South. This is an important novel I look forward to impacting readers far and wide.
—Devi S. Laskar, author of The Atlas of Reds and Blues, winner of the APA Award in Literature
Kevin McIlvoy is a writer of incisive moral vision, and One Kind Favor looks at the brutality of racial injustice in a North Carolina town with a powerful sense of place and clarity and insight.
—Karen E. Bender, author of Refund, finalist for the National Book Award
The shapeshifting beast that is racism haunts small town North Carolina as the living and the dead collide with the past and the present in this novel of boundless surprise, wit, and wisdom.
—T. Geronimo Johnson, author of Welcome to Braggsville
Cord, the spirit-haunted North Carolinan town of One Kind Favor, is down the rabbit hole, through the looking glass, somewhere over the rainbow after the cyclone-lifted house touches down in that other land. It is uncomfortably situated in our “tikilit bloody present.” I describe Cord as “spirit-haunted,” but is any place in America not haunted by ancestral misdeeds? Squint into the mirror McIlvoy provides, but don’t dare look at the grotesqueries and pretend you’re looking into a funhouse mirror. This is what we really look like.
—Rion Amilcar Scott, author of The World Doesn’t Require You
In One Kind Favor, Kevin McIlvoy crafts a novel we haven’t seen before: a rare book about race and place that offers a nuanced take on the world we live in. The concerns are universal, including what it means to witness trauma in our increasingly divided world. The music is uncompromising—you are drawn into the strikingly beautiful, taut, and relentless prose. The novel’s hugeness of heart and fierceness will keep you reading. This book feels vital for our times.
—Nina McConigley, author of Cowboys and East Indians, winner of the PEN Open Book Award
Where to Purchase One Kind Favor: