Low and Slow

The pit has been cold for eleven years.

Calder Springs lost its highway a decade ago, and Hollis & Daughter lost its customers with it. Junie Hollis has run the family barbecue joint alone since her father died. She is forty-four years old, six weeks from selling the smoker to a man in Austin who wants it numbered and hauled away on a flatbed, and she owes a cattleman six thousand dollars she cannot pay.

So she builds a real wood fire in the brick pit. Post oak. The first one since 2013. One last cook, done properly, before the trailer comes.

That night the wall at the back of her walk-in cooler goes warm.

Behind the panel there is no wall at all. There is cut stone, a lintel that was already there in 1961, and nine steps down to a lamplit landing where four hundred people live and work - and where nobody has eaten anything off a wood fire since the night her pit went cold.

They have no dollars. She has no customers.

What she has is a fire, eleven splits of oak, and until Tuesday to work out what a plate is worth.

What this book is

A quiet, slow, working novel about a woman keeping a business alive. There is no chosen one and no prophecy. Nobody threatens Junie Hollis and nobody has to - her problem is arithmetic, and it is genuinely frightening.

It is about a fourteen-hour cook and a four-cubic-foot cooler. About a currency that is worth nothing on one side of a wall and a day's wage on the other. About hiring a dishwasher because you are drowning rather than because you are kind. About the exact moment a woman who has been good at one thing for twenty-two years finds out that doing it harder makes it worse.

And there are recipes

Ten of them, in the back, in the order the dishes appear in the story. Central Texas brisket. Coarse beef sausage, Elgin style. Burnt ends, pinto beans, Texas toast, plate ribs, a whole smoked cauliflower.

They are written the way somebody would tell you if you asked them in their own kitchen - times as ranges rather than clocks, doneness as a feel rather than a number, and every one ending with the way it fails most often.

Hollis & Daughter

Barbecue at the bottom of the world.

Six books, one building, one fire. The room does not change. The season changes, the crowd changes, and what is on the counter changes.

Book One asks whether she can hold the pit alone.