Carlisle Montgomery

Book excerpt: Harry Kollatz Junior’s debut novel. Carlisle Montgomery is a "six-foot-five, redheaded, pigtailed, gap-and-bucktoothed, nine-fingered, guitar playing freak.” Smoking, slugging whisky, arm wrestling, entangled with women and men and with her hard-touring group, the Live Wires, a "bluegrass band with a honky-tonk problem they’re not trying to fix" with their "purebred American Mongrel music." It’s the 1990s and the world is divided between Grunge and Garth Brooks and this story delves into the heart of what it means to be a musician and an artist in a changing world. "A dizzying, dazzling, physical novel, featuring an epic character sometimes great at love, sometimes great at being bad at it. Kollatz lays downright musical tracks in breathless, thumping prose, and Carlisle Montgomery, like its heroine, is damn near invincible." -- Susann Cokal, The Kingdom of Little Wounds, Mermaid Moon