A baby. It’s the one thing Romie Grodin, orphaned at thirteen, wants more than anything else in the world. A real homeplace. It’s what her coal-mining husband Jasper wants—needs—to provide for his family. When the couple’s best friend—their only “family”—is hurt in a mining accident and his wife becomes addicted to drugs, Romie and Jasper must make life-altering decisions that challenge their strengths and threaten their very existence and that of the land they love.

“Born to toil in an already-struggling coal town, the couple at the heart of Filling the Big Empty strive for a better life only to be blocked at every turn. Rhonda Browning White knows how powerfully things can go wrong when people feel they have no choice.”

–Stewart O’Nan, national bestselling author of Snow Angels and The Good Wife

“While Faulkner, O’Connor, and their allies gave us a South beset by ghosts from an impossible past and governed by malevolent grotesques beyond horror-film imaginings, the forces of evil in Rhonda Browning White’s New South are less otherworldly but just as deadly.Filling the Big Empty chronicles the struggles of a decent, working-class couple up against rapacious mining and development interests embedded in so many rural communities, with their attempts to fashion a simple but meaningful life complicated exponentially by the scourge of opioid addiction spreading across the landscape as implacably as Kudzu.This is a story that is alternately tender and tragic, and ultimately one that rings true.”

–Les Standiford, national bestselling author of Bringing Adam Home and Last Train To Paradise.

“Filling the Big Empty could only have been written by someone who knows firsthand the pain and heartbreak as well as the faith and resilience of the people in Appalachia’s deeply blighted and gloriously beautiful coal mining country. Rhonda Browning White’s love for her characters comes through in every word of this powerful and moving debut novel.”

–Ed Falco, NY Times Bestselling Author of The Family Corleone and Transcendent Gardening

“Filling the Big Empty is a marvelous novel. Rhonda Browning White’s view of life in Appalachia’s coal country is unsparing in its depiction of environmental and economic devastation, yet there is also hard-earned hope and resilience in her characters. They are never mere caricatures. Neither demonized nor sentimentalized, they are fully human, and we come to care deeply as they struggle to find their place in the world. Filling the Big Empty places Rhonda Browning White among our region’s best novelists.”

–Ron Rash, NY Times Bestselling Author of Serena and The Caretaker

Rhonda Browing White’s finely written debut novel bravely examines two of the greatest ills of modern Appalachia, mountaintop removal and opioid addiction, but Filling the Big Empty is no simple polemic. White centers her complex story on the flawed and fragile characters of Jasper and Romie, a couple whose lives are upended by those ugly forces that surround them. We root for them as they struggle through hard losses and poor choices. “Grief isn’t an illness,” Romie learns, and White shows us that it can be survived.

— Marlin Barton, award-winning author of Children of the Dust and Pasture Art

“A poignant, powerful, necessary story of the men and women who work vineyards, forests, and mines they will never own. Moment by moment the writing is incandescent, heartfelt, authentic, full of grace.”

— Robert M. Olmstead, author of nationally acclaimed Coal Black Horse and Savage Country

“Men go into dank, dark, dangerous coal mines to win food for their tables and the respect of their fellows. Rhonda Browning White knows this world, and that of the women who cope with the effects: disease, injury, addiction, death. With the inevitability and closing shock of Greek tragedy, she illuminates the joys and agonies of an Appalachian family who face narrowing choices brought about by their own actions. Filling the Big Empty is a modern classic of Appalachian literature.”

— Valerie Nieman, author of To the Bones and In the Lonely Backwater

“Rhonda Browning White’s novel starts with its characters confronting the ravages of mountaintop removal mining and ends with them tackling a chemical spill that poisons their county’s municipal water. The author uses this apocalyptic world to explore, with empathy and in a limpid style, the daily struggle of miners, opioid addiction, the importance of family as well as the joys, demands, and challenges of friendship. A captivating and thought-provoking story which leaves us with hope in the face of tragedy.”

— Vinod Busjeet, author of Silent Winds, Dry Seas

Filling the Big Empty tells the story of a haunted people: haunted by a toxic landscape left in the wake of a callous coal industry; haunted by the addictions and struggles of their friends and families. And yet, it is also the story of a people who find a way to bend, no matter how dark the skies, toward hope.

—Andrew K. Clark, author of Where Dark Things Grow

In her wrenching and moving debut novel Filling the Big Empty, Rhonda Browning White bears plangent tribute to a struggling young Appalachian couple and the love that sustains them. Alternately tragic and inspiring, the novel also speaks eloquently to an array of interconnected societal issues--mountaintop-removal mining, opioid addiction, and the quest to save one’s family and home from the ravages of corporate greed--while credibly carving a path to redemption.

— Eric Giroux, author of Zodiac Pets and Ring On Deli

Filling the Big Empty paints a vivid picture of life around modern-day Appalachian coal fields. Miners are grateful for the money they make while simultaneously fearing the day it’s snatched away, either in the seconds it takes for a mine roof to collapse on them, or in the years the coal ravages their bodies and their lungs. On the backdrop of mountains millennia old, two young couples experience life, death, treachery, fear, betrayal, hope, and discovery.Rhonda Browning White cuts no corners in exposing the desires to leave the mountains, and the inexplicable draw to return to them.

— M. Lynne Squires, author of Letters to My Son