Book excerpt: From the author of the acclaimed debut Pretty Little Dirty comes a complex, seductive novel about race and culture, set in New Orleans. Babylon Rolling is a glittering, gritty, unflinching novel of five families living along an Uptown block in the year before Hurricane Katrina. Told in numerous voices, it explores what happens when forces collide in the boozy, humid city that care forgot. At once an exploration of ethnicity and a portrait of a city on the edge of annihilation, Babylon Rolling is a brave and masterful novel.