It begins as a simple dream.

An idealistic environmental scientist moves his wife and young son off the grid, to a stretch of river bottom farmland in the Mississippi hills, hoping to position himself at the forefront of a revolution in agriculture.

Within a year, he is ruined.

When a corpse appears on his family''s property, the farmer is convinced he''s being set up. And so begins a journey into a maze of misperceptions and personal obsessions, as the farmer, his now-estranged wife, a predatory deputy, and a backwoods wanderer, all try to uphold a personal sense of honour.

A darkly comic debut novel by an independent bookseller, Soil traces one man''s apocalypse to its epic showdown in the Mississippi mudflats.