PENALTIES OF JUNE

The millennium is drawing to a close. Pratt, a young Floridian who’s just finished a prison sentence he both did and didn’t deserve, is looking to start a new life. But will he be able to shake his shady past?

Brimming with tension, action, wry dialogue, and unexpected pathos, Penalties of June is John Brandon’s sixth book published by McSweeney’s. With his distinct feel for the underbelly of his home state of Florida, Brandon takes readers into the forbidding corners of the Tampa Bay area—unsavory motels, secondhand shops, no-frills diners, and dubious used-car lots. Pratt navigates crime bosses and drug dealers on a perilous mission, his steed a trusty (if creaky) Chrysler LeBaron. Faced with an impossible choice, and the prospect of finally finding love after years behind bars, Pratt risks it all for a chance at making things right.

Praise for Penalties of June

“A compelling thriller.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Bursts with sharp descriptions of the Sunshine State. This noirish romp hits all the right notes.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Dark but heartfelt […] wry observations of Florida’s grit and its salty characters zip the reader along, promising that even earnest moments never veer into sentimentality.”
—Garden and Gun

“Recently, on the internet, I saw John Brandon referred to as a ‘cult writer.’ Well, if John Brandon is a cult writer, then drive me to Jonestown and pour me a tall glass of Kool-Aid. Nobody else is writing books like his right now, and nobody who can capture pure, crime-ridden, existential American malaise the way Brandon can. In his latest, a young man is paroled out of prison in the late 90s and returns to a Florida hometown he needs to escape and a blood debt he’s got no choice but to pay. And debt is what this book’s all about; it’s a slow burn under a relentlessly hot summer sun about what people do and don’t owe and what we can and cannot fix.”
—Chris Lee, Boswell Book Company, Milwaukee, WI

“John Brandon writes the frontage roads and strip malls of central Florida like Elmore Leonard wrote Detroit. In prose as brisk and clear as a subtropical spring, Penalties of June casts a spell of sunlit menace, desire and redemption. A propulsive, big-hearted thriller that elevates the genre.”
—Wells Tower, author of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

“I can’t remember the last time I rooted so hard for a character, the last time I rushed to read faster simply because I cared so much. John Brandon has created a propulsive narrative that tightens around its unlikely protagonist. Gritty and dark, yet somehow full of heart, this novel’s achievements include its sentence-level acuity, wry humor, and startlingly honest vision of a ‘weedy, sun-whipped inland Florida’ where ‘nobody’s happy but the snakes.’ A bracing, redeeming read.”
—Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs

“It is difficult to say how good a writer John Brandon is without sounding suspicious, distracting, or precious. To wit: clean unblowsy non-puffery prose that invites you not put the books down; he is as good as Charles Willeford in them Florida blues ways and in more serious literary ways; he hits things with the heft of a fungo bat exposing the quiet sinisterism in nearly everything. What a delight to read someone who can write.”
—Padgett Powell, author of Edisto

“John Brandon’s excellent novel follows one of my all-time favorite characters: twenty-five-year-old Pratt, who has emerged from three years in prison into the heat of summer in Florida, 1998. Pratt’s worries compound by the day as he navigates his new life, which is more burdensome and lonelier than the old one. Brandon captures fictional Bethuna, Florida, in all its Floridian glory, the gators and spiders and snakes, hoarder retirees and juvenile delinquents. But it’s a rich and beautiful place, too. Penalties of June is a bleak tale made lighter by Brandon’s atmospheric prose, the hope for grace, and the love of a few true friends.”
—Mary Miller, author of Biloxi