“The Barn is the most brutal, layered and absolutely beautiful book about Mississippi, and really how the world conspired with the best and worst parts of Mississippi, I will ever read…Reporting and reckoning can get no better, or more important, than this.” — Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division and Heavy: An American Memoir
“An incredible history of a crime that changed America.” — John Grisham
"With integrity, and soul, Thompson unearths the terrible how and why, carrying us back and forth through time, deep in Mississippi—baring, sweat, soil, and heart all the way through.” — Imani Perry
“In this arresting, insightful book, Wright Thompson takes a deep dive into the historical record to guide us on a compelling, thousand-year international journey of power, greed, corruption and injustice, leading inevitably to the lynching of Emmett Till.”— Christopher Benson, Associate Professor, Medill School of Journalism; co-author with Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., A Few Days Full of Trouble: Revelations on the Journey to Justice for My Cousin and Best Friend, Emmett Till
“Though grounded in a small radius within the landscape of Mississippi, this capacious examination of a terrible history is both expansive and granular, national and personal. Thompson writes with a tone of relentless urgency at once tempered by a deep reflection on what becomes, ultimately, a seemingly unavoidable trajectory, a cataclysmic inevitability—the consequences of material greed and cruel disregard—into which our nation and the people in it were thrust.” — Natasha Trethewey
