Jeanine Cummins 4 Book Set (American Dirt, The Crooked Branch, The Outside Boy & A Rip in Heaven)

This four-book set brings together Jeanine Cummins’ American Dirt, The Crooked Branch, The Outside Boy and A Rip in Heaven. Moving between fiction and personal testimony, the collection spans contemporary Mexico, mid-century Ireland and the United States, with each story shaped by violence, loss and upheaval.

Across the four titles, a bookseller is forced to run for her life, a new mother uncovers a disturbing family diary, a travelling boy faces change, and a real assault from 1991 is recounted. Each narrative explores survival and the enduring impact of traumatic events.

Included titles

• American Dirt
• The Crooked Branch
• The Outside Boy
• A Rip in Heaven

Key details

• Four-book set
• Author: Jeanine Cummins
• Includes American Dirt, The Crooked Branch, The Outside Boy and A Rip in Heaven

Synopses

American Dirt

Lydia Perez runs a bookshop in Acapulco and is married to a journalist; their eight-year-old son, Luca, completes their family. When violence shatters their lives in a city controlled by a drug cartel, Lydia and Luca have no choice but to flee, travelling north towards the border and doing whatever they can to stay alive.

The Crooked Branch

After the birth of her daughter Emma, Majella feels isolated and exhausted. Returning to her childhood home, she discovers the diary of her maternal ancestor, Ginny, and is shocked by an account of murder in the family’s past.

As famine closes in, Ginny Doyle escapes from Ireland to America, but not all of her family survives. Her diary leaves Majella with unsettling questions about what really happened.

The Outside Boy

Ireland, 1959. Christopher Hurley is a tinker, a Pavee gypsy, travelling with his father and extended family from town to town with their possessions in wagons. Carrying guilt over his mother’s death in childbirth, Christy faces further change when his grandfather dies and his father decides to settle briefly so he and his cousin can attend school.

A Rip in Heaven

A Rip in Heaven tells Jeanine Cummins’ account of a night in April 1991, when her cousins Julie and Robin Kerry and her brother Tom were assaulted on the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge near St. Louis. After a harrowing ordeal, Tom escapes to find help, believing the nightmare is over, but he is mistaken.