The best fiction informs and often re-shapes the way we see things. Will Allison’s glorious debut—WHAT YOU HAVE LEFT: A Novel penetrates the psyche of one family and shows how what seems unforgivable to one person might have been unavoidable for another. Allison offers extraordinary insight into the forces that drive people and is a brilliant observer of the emotional legacies handed down from parent to child, of history repeating itself from generation to generation, and of the strikingly different ways two people can experience the same events.

In 1976, on the day of his wife’s funeral, Wylie Greer drops off his five-year-old daughter, Holly, at his father-in-law’s dairy farm on the outskirts of Columbia, South Carolina. Wylie tells her he just needs a little time to clear his head, but thirty years pass before Holly sees her father again—“Time I spent wondering what I’d done to make him leave,” she says, “and what I could do to make him come back.”

WHAT YOU HAVE LEFT is the unforgettable story of a father and daughter inching their way back to one another across three decades of ambivalence, crossed wires, and false starts—all the while hoping to discover that what they have left is worth salvaging. It’s also the story of a grandfather bent on suicide, a pioneering female NASCAR driver, a heartbroken amnesiac, a video poker junkie, and assorted other liars, cheaters, and lovers who, despite their best intentions, never quite live up to their own expectations.”

Will Allison understands what makes people tick, and his great talent is to translate that empathy into entirely fluid, organic storytelling: no detail is superfluous, yet neither is anything forced in order to drive home an emotional point. And though his characters are very specific and idiosyncratic, part of the magic is that there is still enough space in the narrative to allow readers to insert their own experience, making WHAT YOU HAVE LEFT a story of universal appeal.
Using bold shifts in viewpoint and time, this stunning debut brims with an affection for humanity exactly as it is—in all its ignorance and awareness, its swagger and humility, its despair and hope.

About the Author

Will Allison was born in Columbia, South Carolina, and now lives with his wife and daughter in South Orange, NJ. The former executive editor of Story, he serves as a staff member at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. His short stories have appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, Glimmer Train, One Story, Kenyon Review, and other magazines and have been shortlisted in The Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. This is his first novel. For more about the author, visit www.WillAllison.com.