A baby. It’s the one thing Romie Grodin, orphaned at thirteen, wants more than anything else in the world. A real homeplace. It’s what her coal-mining husband Jasper wants—needs—to provide for his family. When the couple’s best friend—their only “family”—is hurt in a mining accident and his wife becomes addicted to drugs, Romie and Jasper must make life-altering decisions that challenge their strengths and threaten their very existence and that of the land they love.
“Born to toil in an already-struggling coal town, the couple at the heart of Filling the Big Empty strive for a better life only to be blocked at every turn. Rhonda Browning White knows how powerfully things can go wrong when people feel they have no choice.”
–Stewart O’Nan, national bestselling author of Snow Angels and The Good Wife
“While Faulkner, O’Connor, and their allies gave us a South beset by ghosts from an impossible past and governed by malevolent grotesques beyond horror-film imaginings, the forces of evil in Rhonda Browning White’s New South are less otherworldly but just as deadly. Filling the Big Empty chronicles the struggles of a decent, working-class couple up against rapacious mining and development interests embedded in so many rural communities, with their attempts to fashion a simple but meaningful life complicated exponentially by the scourge of opioid addiction spreading across the landscape as implacably as Kudzu. This is a story that is alternately tender and tragic, and ultimately one that rings true.”
–Les Standiford, national bestselling author of Bringing Adam Home and Last Train To Paradise.
“Filling the Big Empty could only have been written by someone who knows firsthand the pain and heartbreak as well as the faith and resilience of the people in Appalachia’s deeply blighted and gloriously beautiful coal mining country. Rhonda Browning White’s love for her characters comes through in every word of this powerful and moving debut novel.”
–Ed Falco, NY Times Bestselling Author of The Family Corleone and Transcendent Gardening
“Filling the Big Empty is a marvelous novel. Rhonda Browning White’s view of life in Appalachia’s coal country is unsparing in its depiction of environmental and economic devastation, yet there is also hard-earned hope and resilience in her characters. They are never mere caricatures. Neither demonized nor sentimentalized, they are fully human, and we come to care deeply as they struggle to find their place in the world. Filling the Big Empty places Rhonda Browning White among our region’s best novelists.”
–Ron Rash, NY Times bestselling author of Serena and The Caretaker
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rhonda Browning White gleefully resides in Hickory, NC. She received the 2019 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction for her short-story collection, The Lightness of Water and Other Stories. Four of her stories have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes; alas, she is still a Pushcart bridesmaid. Her blog “Read. Write. Live!” is found at www.RhondaBrowningWhite.com. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Converse College in Spartanburg, SC, and was awarded the Sterling Watson Fellowship and the Les Standiford Scholarship from Eckerd College’s Writers in Paradise.
Rhonda Browning White is available as a guest lecturer, workshop leader, and book club speaker, virtually or in person. You may contact her at RBrowningWhite@gmail.com to schedule.
