Fancy Gap

by Zak Jones

A powerful, unforgettable three estranged generations in Appalachia struggle with loss, poverty, and their individual demons, until an explosive climax brings them together in a most unexpected way.

In the hills and isolated mountain enclaves of southern Appalachia, Nana Grace has left her own family behind to become the “Shepherd” of a disaffected flock of worshippers that she keeps in thrall through both charismatic preaching and the dispensing of stolen drugs.

Her daughter struggles with breast cancer, the painful effects of its treatment, and the expectation to perform unceasing gratitude toward the evangelical community that reluctantly supports her out of a transactional sense of duty.

Her eldest son, Dalton, has been discharged from the army under conditions "Other than Honorable"; accused of breaching the policy of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. He drifts hesitantly home, pulled by guilt and love for his younger brother. Messy (christened Messiah at Grace’s insistence) is awkward in a world that attacks difference. Guided by faith, tortured by abandonment, Messy eventually develops a warped moral code shaped by alienation and anger.

Fancy Gap is an unflinching look at the desperation that throws kerosene on the flames of opioid use, poverty, illness, and apocalyptic Christianity. Profound and captivating, violent and lyrical, it introduces Zak Jones as a compelling and original new voice in Canadian literature.

Genres: Fiction, Canada, Literary Fiction, Contemporary

336 pages, Hardcover

Published February 17, 2026

About the author

Zak Jones is the author of Fancy Gap (Hamish Hamilton, 2026). He is a writer and literary scholar. A dual Canadian-American citizen, he grew up between rural North Carolina and Toronto. His short story, “So Much More to Say,” won the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s 2023 Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, and his story, “Love Handles,” won the 2023 Norma Epstein National Award. Jones is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Toronto studying veterans’ narratives in American Literature, writing his second novel, and developing an archival documentary project, Riding Six White Horses.

Reviews

[Stitching Ghost]

Bleak and depressing, that's about all I have to say about it. On paper this one hits a lot of the beats that should have made it a hit with me but I never felt like it was going anywhere more like it flaccidly meandered to its conclusion.

[Zak Jones]

What the hell?

[Juliann]

Southern gothic meets cult horror meets the dry dust of a gravel road. This is a *novel* and a damn fine one. The prose is alive with sound, smell, and texture, bearing echoes of Faulkner and O’Connor. The story makes you think on the micro and the macro level. Wise and intelligent.

Thanks to Hamish Hamilton for the ARC.

[John Waites]

Fancy Gap by Zak Jones is not just a debut novel — it’s an autopsy of America. Of its God. Of its promises. Of the quiet, grinding cruelty baked into the land.

Set in an Appalachian town drowning in poverty, pills, and prayer, this book follows three generations of the Fuquay family — and every single one of them is fighting to survive something inherited.

Dalton, freshly discharged from the Army under a cloud of shame, drifts from job to job, carrying guilt like a second skin. Jane, his mother, battles cancer with wine and prescription bottles, clinging to a church that has long since betrayed her. Messy — sweet, abandoned, aching Messy — moves through foster homes and Bible camps just wanting someone to choose him. And then there’s Grace, the grandmother, a born-again preacher in the mountains, delivering fire-and-brimstone sermons while dispensing her own version of salvation.

Addiction. Religious extremism. White supremacy. The coal industry. The military machine. Generational neglect.

Jones doesn’t flinch from any of it.

This isn’t poverty porn. It isn’t caricature. It’s intimate. It’s furious. It’s painfully human.

On every page, Jones forces us to look at the parts of America we’d rather ignore — the grey monotony, the spiritual hunger, the systems that promise salvation but deliver abandonment.

And somehow, through all that darkness, he still writes with compassion.

A blistering, unflinching debut about faith, family, and the long shadow of inherited pain. I won’t stop thinking about it.

[Madeleine]

this book is wild

[Phillip]

This book is like True Detective S1 (poor backwaters of the American south) meets a Ruth Ozeki novel.

[Leelo Farhan]

An incredibly impressive debut. Atmospheric, emotional but also somehow simultaneously detached. I found myself thinking of the characters when I wasn’t reading - a surefire way to know I’ve fallen for a book. Can’t wait to read more from this author in the future.

[Isabelle]

Interesting and unexpected

[Hailey]

4.5**

[Maxime Brunet]

More of a 4.5 - change your ratings goodreads.

A great debut novel. Every chapter is written from the perspective of a different character, showing you how many sides there can be to one story. As the plot progressed, I found it hard to put this book down. I just wanted to know what happened to everyone! The writing is strong.

It is a dark and difficult story, but it explores the times we live in.

[Brenda]

4.5 ⭐️

[Susan]

4.5 stars rounded up for me. A great debut novel by Zak Jones, a Canadian author! Can't wait to see what comes next from Mr. Jones.

Fancy Gap is hillbilly noir. Its dark and dirty and dusty and full of all the grit that sits on the counters of the mobile homes scattered on the back rounds off the Blue Ridge Parkway of Virginia. Drugs, alcohol, murder, arson, and apocolyptic religion. Mix in a few "patriots" and lots of guns and trucks for good measure and we have what seems to actually be happening in the real world south of here.

Only a few main characters in this story: Grace (bible thumpin' granny from hell), Jane, (Grace's daughter, dying of cancer) Dalton and Messiah, (Jane's sons....Dalton booted out of the army, and Messiah, oh lawd, a piece of work indeed) and a few others that move the story along. Each chapter is dedicated to a main character. All of these people are deeply, deeply flawed and Granny Grace is indeed cray-cray...as in preaching stark naked and feeding drugs to the parishoners...

I thought the book was great. My only little complaint is that I thought the ending was a wee bit unsatisfactory, but a terrific read none-the-less.

[Lauren Elyse]

this was the most beautiful novel I have read in forever.

I am naturally drawn to themes akin to southern gothic, but I understand how the appeal was lost on some people due to the bleakness of the tone. The way that Jones reveals information about the characters conjured an empathy and a closeness to them that I haven't felt in quite some time.

plot was NUTS. no idea where it was headed, beautifully built and carried out in a way which gripped me the whole way through. I haven't cried at the end of a novel since call my by your name :) very cool stuff

what a stunning debut. I cannot wait for the rest of jones' career.

[Britt-isms]

The writing was good, and this genre is totally my cup of tea. I feel the characters and stories could have been flushed out more but a lot was left hanging. Like what happened to Clyde?

[Akeel Ghann]

3.5 stars

It’s starts pretty slow and doesn’t pick up much until part 2 but it’s a beautifully written book with an engaging story. I wish some of the characters and stories had more detail for quite a long book, it just felt like there was so much fluff. It is worth reading for part 3 alone though!

[Krystal LHL]

“A powerful, unforgettable debut: three estranged generations in Appalachia grapple with loss, poverty, and their individual demons, until an explosive climax brings them together in apocalyptic deliverance.” I had to borrow this quote from Penguin because it’s the perfect summary.

It’s dark, isolating, and bleak. It’s desperate, and scary. Themes of violence, addiction, religious trauma, and power struggles. A deeply human and raw story.

Fancy Gap was a slow burn with carefully thought out character development. You get to know each character so deeply and their relationships with each other, without experiencing these characters together in real time very much.

Messy/Messiah. How my heart broke for him. It’s devastating what abandonment and isolation can turn a person into. Someone just desperate to belong can be so easily influenced and manipulated.

Definitely looking forward to seeing what else Zak Jones writes!

[Tobin Elliott]

This is a DNF. Fifty pages in and it just didn't really seem to be going anywhere.

[Kavita Krueger]

“It was as if they prayed to two different gods. This was a different kind of worship.” (97)

I read and listened to a few interviews that Jones gave about the book, and in them I know I’d found an author with a kindred spirit, someone else trying to capture the gritty cruelty and beauty of small rural towns and the people who are found there. The grief, the desperation, the fear. But also the holiness.

The writing was very cinematic. Sentences felt like snapshots, hovering, capturing the scene completely.

“Dalton watched as a couple of other workers walked to their own cars. Cups in the seat. Cigarettes lit with the windows up. The glass fogged. NRA bumper sticker. Confederate flag air freshener. Bag taped to the missing window. The bag-windowed car pulled out of the strip mall parking lot, crossed the street on a yellow, and drove up the narrow ramp to the Walmart parking lot.” (199)

“You ain’t my brother, Hawk.” They stared at each other, the bugs screaming outside. “You’re something else.” (295)

This book was soaked in the influences of Flannery O’Connor and early Cormac McCarthy, which Jones mentioned himself in his interview with the University of Toronto. But I also sensed Knausgaard and Alistair/Alexander MacCleod, and likely Alice Munro.

I wish this book had been longer. I know ~300 pages is what publishers are looking for from new authors but I could have eaten more.
Jones mentioned the book started as a series of vignettes, which is reminiscent in the structure, which jumped between character’s perspectives, some of who were short lived. Personally, I do not enjoy when books have shifting perspectives, I find it harder to really sink into a story, I would love it more if the perspectives were told in sequence, like a small series of short stories. But of course an author chooses their structure for a reason.

I can’t say I understood the purpose of the prologue and the epilogue, or the point of comparing Dalton and Messiah to Cain and Abel with the Easter lilys - origin of sin in an individual life?
I do feel that there was probably a lot of biblical allusions that I missed or didn’t understand that would’ve elevated the book for me, so I would love to come back to this book in a few years after I’ve studied the bible a bit more.
But I ncluding Ezekiel 7:16 as the epigraph was the perfect touch to really set the thematic tone.

So, Zak Jones, you have a new fan.

[Quinn Redpath]

This book, to me, is so much about how politics shape a country — they pull some in, cast out others, chop and chisel at landscapes, and build up institutions that represent the ideologies and ‘values’ a country purportedly embodies. But what Zak Jones shows so clearly is that politics are not at the forefront of most people’s lives. All of these abstract concepts come from somewhere else, blown outward like seeds — east, west, north, and south —, where they settle and grow fast roots and then form the new foundation for ‘the way things are.’
Politics are inherently alienating, because parties, policy, and implementation imply who this particular imagined world is inclusive of and exclusionary to.
The feeling of being alienated by modern America is shared by many characters in Fancy Gap. Some explicitly feel left behind and therefore have a retaliatory rage, which we see heat closer to a boiling point; Grace’s flock, for example, “shared a suspicion that they’d become of the refuse of modernity” (61). Others don’t think about it in such direct terms — sometimes there just isn’t the time or energy left to think about why it’s come to this, and frankly it would hurt too much. And when you don’t have the means to change it, maybe it’s better to understand these circumstances as natural, immovable, ordinary.
Fancy Gap is brimming with empathy, but never pulls the strings of intersection and relation too tightly as to cast out complexity. I have oft seen and heard Appalachia painted with one broad brush. Sometimes it’s about drugs, or education, or susceptibility to belief in certain political figures and their promises.

But whatever the particular comment or opinion is, the baseline feeling is typically “you get what you asked for.” All reason and nuance flies away when all of a sudden we’re dealing with notions of ‘deservingness.’ Suddenly circumstance becomes punishment. And we know how America gets off on perpetual punishment. Even just the idea that punishment of others puts us somewhere else, makes us a different people.

And Jones shows life and relationships as performance-in-action so astutely, it knocked my socks off! Performing charity (78, 103), grief (126), anger, passion (71), patriotism (140-160, 278) — all of these things we do in self-consciousness to be the kind of person we think we are (or think we should be). I don’t have much else to say, the book on its own says it all.
If you don’t read this, it’ll be a sprout in your “life’s crop of inextinguishable regrets” (30).

[Amy Evans]

I bought this book while vacationing in Canada. As I enjoy Appalachian literature, imagine my delight at finding a book about Fancy Gap, a place not far at all from my home, while on vacation in another country. Normally I vet books, but I impulsively bought this one. Because I am stubborn, I also finished it. I can see why it's getting some literary accolades; it is well-written. But it is also hopelessly depressing and, in my opinion, unrepresentative of a very complex culture. Are there problems in Appalachia? Absolutely. Is everyone a drug-addicted, right-winged confederate, gun-slinging, poverty-stricken, uneducated, murdering, racist cult member with no sense whatsoever. No. If I were a Canadian and read this book, not only would I have no further desire to learn about this region, I'd probably be terrified to even drive through it. But as someone who has been to every one of the little towns mentioned in the book, I can tell you, I have encountered very few people who are as remotely damaged as the characters in this story. I can only assume that the author, who I understand grew up here, had no interest in giving a balanced view of the area and its people, but was trying to weave a Demon Copperhead-like tale without the occasional levity therein. Life isn't 100% bad, even in Appalachia.

[Michael]

“Fancy Gap” traces the lives of three estranged generations of a family in southern Appalachia. Each generation struggles with its demons which are partially inherited and partially self-induced.

Nana Grace left her family to become a self-styled, evangelical, pulpit-pounding preacher in her house on the mountain. Her daughter Jane battles breast cancer and carries the weight of expectation from an evangelical church the supports her financially while privately condemning her.

Jane’s oldest son Dalton is discharged from the army under conditions “Other Than Honourable” and hits the road grieving his mother and carrying the guilt of abandoning has brother Messiah. Messiah is tortured by the pain of abandonment and eventually falls under the spell of Nana and her corrupted evangelism.

“Fancy Gap” builds to a violent end fueled by opioid use, poverty and apocalyptic Christianity. It is a wrenching story of tortured characters living on the edge of American society who are damned to tragic endings.

[Matteo]

Goddamn did Jesus ever weep.

A strong debut novel about grief, religion, addiction, shame and how a family in the Appalachian countryside responds to tragedy.

Fancy Gap is the sort of thing that feels alive as you read it. Jones’ biggest strength as a writer is the vividness of his prose, his ability to make me smell, taste, feel and hear his words is striking. And the beauty of certain passages left me awestruck.

Certain chapters meander slightly, and the ending feels rushed. Yet, the characters are written so authentically, consistently and interestingly, and the world he crafts feels so familiar that the final pages still feel strong and linger in your mind.

Very excited to see how his career evolves.

[Laurie Burns]

This was fine. I think I wanted to like it more.
I did listen to it on audiobook, and I think perhaps I would have liked it more as just a print book? The narration is well one, but you know it is very "hillbilly" and I would admit I tend to have an internal bias of dislike.
Everyone in this book is sad and lonely and most of them are terrible.

There are a lot of drugs, and a grandma running her own "church" and boys that nobody cares about.
It was all just depressing and lonely and I find it drug along a little bit.

[Deirdre]

What's a better sign of a brilliant book than a lasting impression of its characters and scenery? I feel like I've genuinely driven through the mountains of Appalachia and North Carolina, even though I've never been. Zak Jones' ability to build a world through his epic descriptions made me feel like I was right there. I'm still parting ways with its characters, especially Grace. Bye, Grace.

This is a smart book and a great read. Could not recommend it enough!

[Stephen Altena]

I was drawn in by the characters, and that convinced me to continue with their journey.

These are characters not just from the other side of the tracks, but the other side of the ditch.
And the author makes you feel it.

Redemption and salvation play a role. Do they achieve it? Are they predestined for failure? Do they have any choice?

[Jane]

3.5. Many aspects of this I liked and many I didn’t. Very interesting premise and concept, and good (if confusing) endings I wanted more on Grace’s backstory, and many scenes in the first 2/3rds of the book felt like they could have been cut down. I wanted to keep reading but was also confused by some choices.

[Debbie]

I have read Fancy Gap by Zak Jones. It wasn’t my genre of book. The cult like religion that the Grandmother practised and the drugs they did I found disturbing. It was a story about a family grandmother, Mother, and 2 sons and the trials and tribulations of the family.

[Meg Harmer]

I read 80% of this book in a day, and longed for time to dive back in after. This was incredible— dark, riveting, meth-infused gothic literature with an insanely riveting plot structure. I can’t believe this was a debut novel. Well done, Zak. I will be reading all your future works.

[Autumn]

Beyond skeptical, given that I literally drove through Fancy Gap the day after my mom died. At least this guy was in Surry/Stokes county when he wasn't in Toronto. We'll see!

[Lesley O'Neill]

Really incredible, Zak.