'I was really struck by the intelligence of the book, as well as the significance of the story that he's telling, about what it's like to be a modern Indigenous person in this country, as a Native American, and to be in the foster care system. Sequoyah’s community and experience is one we all need to know, and Hobson delivers the young man’s story in a deeply profound narrative.' - KMUW Wichita Public Radio 'A powerful testament to one young Native American’s will to survive his lonely existence. ' This is a dark story that depicts the loneliness and pain of unwanted children and the foster care system where they end up. this novel breathes with a dark, pulsing life of its own.' - The Tulsa Voice 'A strange and powerful Native American Bildungsroman. 'An extraordinary book.' - NPR's Code Switch 2019 In the Margins Book Award Top Fiction Novel.Sequoyah and Rosemary bond over their shared Native American background and tumultuous paths through the foster care system, but as Sequoyah’s feelings toward Rosemary deepen, the precariousness of their lives and the scars of their pasts threaten to undo them both. At least until he meets seventeen-year-old Rosemary, a troubled artist who also lives with the family. Literally and figuratively scarred by his mother’s years of substance abuse, Sequoyah keeps mostly to himself, living with his emotions pressed deep below the surface.

With his single mother in jail, Sequoyah, a fifteen-year-old Cherokee boy, is placed in foster care with the Troutt family. Set in rural Oklahoma during the late 1980s, Where the Dead Sit Talking is a startling, authentically voiced and lyrically written Native American coming-of-age story.

Where the dead sit talking