My name is Yip

Yip Tolroy is different: tiny, hairless, and mute. The inhabitants of Heron's Creek, Georgia, learn to tolerate him, but his is a lonely existence. His father disappeared on the night of his birth, and relations are strained with his stoic mother. When gold is discovered near the small town, treachery and murder result. Teenaged Yip is thrown in with the wily but reckless Dud Carter, an alliance that alters the course of his life. The novel is billed as a western, in the sense that Georgia was on the frontier in the early part of the nineteenth century. But this can more accurately be described as essentially a British literary take on an American-style folk tale, presented from Yip's perspective in a near stream-of-consciousness; his narration is an eccentric hodgepodge of faux backwoods grammar and Dickensian eloquence. Adventure, characterization, and illumination of the human condition are the standouts here, pathos misting over the tale like water on the gold-flecked stones of the town's creek. This is Crewe's debut, and with this distinctive offering, he's proved himself to be an author to watch.

Crewe debuts with a rollicking picaresque set in early 19th-century Appalachia. The night Yip Tolroy is born, his father disappears. Yip is raised by his single mother, who runs a general store and treats Yip as something of an afterthought, mainly because the boy grows up mute. He is also bald and short, so people tend to dismiss him as a simpleton. When Yip turns 14, gold is discovered nearby and Yip witnesses firsthand the violence that gold fever can bring. Forced to flee town after killing a man in self-defense, Yip is accompanied by the resourceful Dud Carter, who becomes his guardian angel. The two reluctantly help a man who escaped from slavery on a quest to find his sister, and Yip is abducted by the operator of a traveling show, who makes Yip play the part of a wild boy kept in a cage. After a "short spell," Yip and Dud are reunited and they return home for a reckoning with their destiny. Yip, who narrates as an adult, is an enthusiastic storyteller, and his relationship with Dud forms the fervent backbone of the episodic narrative. This memorable string of adventures reads like a one-of-a-kind mash-up of Charles Dickens and Cormac McCarthy. Agent: Zoe Waldie, RCW. (May)