A starkly beautiful, morally complicated, and astonishingly accomplished debut set in 1920’s rural Alabama, Work Like Any Other tells the story of Roscoe T Martin, a prideful electrician sent to prison after his illegal siphoning of electrical state power for his wife’s family’s farm leads to an innocent man’s death, and announces the author Virginia Reeves as a major new voice in American fiction.

Roscoe T Martin becomes fascinated by electricity as it spreads through Alabama in the early twentieth century. It is his career as well as his passion. But when his wife inherits her family’s farm, he is forced to give it up, wounding his pride and sense of self until he decides to use his skills to siphon energy from the state and imbue the farm with power and success it has never had. For a time, life is rich and abundant. Then a young electrician stumbles on the illegal lines and is electrocuted, and everything changes.

Virginia Reeves is a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. Her fiction has appeared in The Common and the Baltimore Review and has been short-listed for the Tennessee Williams Fiction Contest and the Alexandra Patterson Cappon Prize for Fiction. Orginially from Helena, Montana, she currently lives in Austin.