The Barn

Haunting . . . The Barn is part investigative journalism, part catharsis. Thompson travels back and forth through space and time, describing a brutal murder on one page, riffing about the blues on another. The story meanders like the myriad tributaries of the Mississippi. The writing is often breathtaking, brutality amplified through perfectly crafted prose. -- Gerard deGroot * The Times * Extraordinary . . . Not only an intimate history of the tragedy, but also a deep meditation on Mississippi and America . . . While sifting through the dirt that buried the facts about Till’s death, Thompson credits the work of the historians, journalists and filmmakers who have sought to tell the true tale. But he crafts a wider, deeper narrative. The Barn is serious history and skillful journalism, but with the nuance and wallop of a finely wrought novel . . . Describes not just the poison of silence and lies, but also the dignity of courage and truth. * Washington Post * With a passion for truth and justice, and a fierce determination to dig for the secrets, Wright Thompson has produced an incredible history of a crime that changed America. -- John Grisham Powerfully pieces together the true story of a horrific murder in the Mississippi Delta in 1955. -- Books of the Month * Independent * Powerful and unflinching . . . What’s unforgettable by the end of Thompson’s book is just how thoroughly this country was built on a belief that some people were worthless and expendable because of the color of their skin . . . Books like The Barn offer some hope that America can heal its oldest and deepest wound. * Associated Press * The most brutal, layered and absolutely beautiful book about Mississippi, and really how the world conspired with the best and worst parts of Mississippi, I will ever read . . . Every generation you get a few writers with the engine of a 747 and the skill of a wizard. We see it in Ward, Wright, Faulkner and Trethewey. And that finely crafted motor is on full display in this work by Wright Thompson. The Barn is the new standard in research and book-making. -- Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir In this important, diligently researched, and beautifully rendered story, Wright Thompson takes up one of the most consequential and tragic events of the twentieth century, the murder of Emmett Till, in the place where it happened. The land, the people, and circumstance are vivid on every page. With integrity, and soul, Thompson unearths the terrible how and why, carrying us back and forth through time, deep in Mississippi - baring, sweat, soil, and heart all the way through. Most of all, Thompson teaches us that history is the most important ghost story there is to tell, and that we - the haunted - must be healed. -- Imani Perry, Professor in African and African American Studies, Harvard University Terrifying and humbling, The Barn is a chilling examination of the American strain of a nasty human disorder: the slow immolation that some communities initiate when they choose enabling mythologies, deceit, silence, injustice, and willed ignorance as their moral orders. * Boston Globe * A gut-punch of a book . . . Foregoing the harrowing photos that emphasize Till’s martyrdom, Thompson dives instead into family trees, court transcripts, witness memoirs and more to unearth the enormous human tragedy we forget at our peril. -- LA Times Crucial facts about this historic injustice are still coming to light, many of which are gathered in Wright Thompson’s gripping, thoroughly researched account of the night Till was murdered - in a barn just over 20 miles from Thompson’s family farm - and the cover up that followed (and continues to this day). * LitHub * Geography, wrote Ralph Ellison, is fate - an axiom painstakingly proven in the compelling architecture of Wright Thompson’s The Barn. Though grounded in a small radius within the landscape of Mississippi, this capacious examination of a terrible history is both expansive and granular, national and personal. Thompson writes with a tone of relentless urgency at once tempered by a deep reflection on what becomes, ultimately, a seemingly unavoidable trajectory, a cataclysmic inevitability - the consequences of material greed and cruel disregard - into which our nation and the people in it were thrust. He writes, too, with a true storyteller’s gift for language and image, and the ability to make grand connections across time and space, to see all the forces culminating in one terrible moment, all the lives destroyed or forever marked by what happened that night. -- Natasha Trewethey, former Poet Laureate of the United States and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry