Discount — Casey Gray

Immigration, suburban poverty, and big-box retail converge in this audacious debut novel of a nation coming apart at the seams

Set in the American Southwest, forty miles north of Juárez, Casey Gray's ambitious, tragicomic, and ultimately redemptive novel follows a group of customers and employees through the twenty-four hour work cycle as they seek comfort and sustenance inside of the cinderblock walls of a classic American institution―The Superstore.

On the eve of the company president's visit to the store, a manager's drunk text to a coworker leads to a series of consequences as brutal as they are wide-ranging: Everyone around him will be affected.

With a cast of characters featuring Ernesto, a local gang member struggling to choose a job pushing carts over a desultory life as a drug dealer; Wilma, a grandmother working double shifts to support her family; and Keith, a high school student with a penchant for filmmaking, Gray offers a startlingly humane, utterly contemporary portrait of life on the suburban fringe.

A vision of an America barely getting by and assaulted by crime, corruption, and exploitation in all of its manifestations, "Discount" is nevertheless a triumphant and big-hearted novel that marks the arrival of a new voice we won't soon forget.