"From its first lines, The Falls of the Wyona deftly, surely immerses the reader in its turbulent, inevitable flow. David Hopes has created a work of not only excellent writing, but excellent reading, combining the exacting narrative of a Jack London or M. Scott Momaday with lines of lyric, almost maternal gentleness, lines that make one close one's eyes and dream of better times ahead." —Ryka Aoki, author of He Mele a Hilo

"Beautifully written." —Reviews by Amos Lassen

"Dave Hopes grants us entry into the wondrous, highly charged world of young male friendship once upon a time. The setting is lovely and nostalgic. I wanted to know all about it, and I even wished I could live there. But there is trouble underneath, and there are things that just cannot happen. Until they do. A pitch-perfect exploration of the terrors and pleasures of American adolescence." —David Pratt, author of Wallaçonia and Bob the Book

★ Quill Prose Award Winner.

In The Falls of the Wyona by David Brendan Hopes, four friends growing up on the banks of a wild Appalachian river just after WWII discover, almost at the same time, the dangerous, alluring Falls and the perils of their own maturing hearts. Seen through the eyes of his best friend Arden, football hero Vince falls in love with the new kid, Glen. They have no context for their feelings, and the next few years of high school become a tense, though sometimes funny, artifice of concealment. The winner of Red Hen’s Quill Prize, The Falls of the Wyona is the first of three achieved (and several more projected) novels by this author imbued with the magical atmosphere of Appalachian culture.

David Brendan Hopes, whose novel The Falls of the Wyona was chosen for Red Hen Press’s 2017 Quill Prose Award, is a poet, playwright, and painter living in Asheville, North Carolina. Originally from Ohio, Hopes taught at Hiram College, Syracuse University, Phillips Exeter Academy, and is now Professor of English at UNCA. His prize-winning plays have been produced in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Cincinnati, Seattle, and London, and his publications have been in venues as diverse as Audubon, the New Yorker, and Best American Poetry, 2016.