Mark Powell (novelist)

Fifteen-year-old Ernest Cobb has fled his South Carolina home after the death of his girlfriend. They both feared she was pregnant and while he's innocent of her murder, he's terrified of facing his father's wrath.

In the late summer of 1944, making his way northward to Asheville through the Blue Ridge Mountains, Ernest meets fellow travelers—drifters, veterans, and outsiders—who are willing to help him. An aging hermit and woodsman, once a glassblower, rescues and revives Ernest after a particularly chilly evening.

Upon his arrival in Asheville, he finds work as a dishwasher, takes shelter in a dreary boardinghouse, and soon becomes involved with a new girlfriend. When their relationship ends, Ernest decides to accompany his friend, June Bug, to the logging camps.

Told in a minimalist style, Prodigals is a novel about Ernest's loss of innocence as well as America's loss of innocence after World War II. Using the American landscape of small towns and logging camps as touchstones, Prodigals focuses on the subculture of transients and the loneliness driving them.[3]

Blood Kin received the Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel in 2005, awarded annually by the Knoxville Writer's Guild and the University of Tennessee.

The Dark Corner tells the story of the three Walker brothers, troubled men struggling to hold their lives together in the South Carolina mountains. With its attention to the natural world and exploration of the clash between the old and the new South, The Dark Corner evokes the fiction of James Dickey and Ron Rash.[4]

The Sheltering is a literary thriller in the tradition of Robert Stone or Jim Harrison. Set primarily in Florida, it tells the story of drone pilot Luther Redding and his family, who suffer a great tragedy. Meanwhile, burned out brothers Donny and Bobby Rosen light out on a drug-fueled road trip to the American West.[5]

Small Treasons is a literary thriller set in North Georgia. It tells the story of John and Tess Maynard, whose marriage is tested when one of John's old CIA colleagues asks him to spy on a professor at his university. The novel explores terrorism, ISIS, and the wreck of 21st century America, and the way old sins never leave us.

Firebird is set during the 2014 Russia-Ukraine conflict. A U.S. arms deal gone south takes you into the underground world of political operatives, Ivy League criminals and a hedge fund billionaire with eyes on the presidency.