““You can write your ass off, Southern girl! With her new novel Landfall, Ellen Urbani enters the world of American fiction with a bang and a flourish. She brings back the terrible Hurricane Katrina that tore some of the heart out of the matchless city of New Orleans, but did not lay a finger on its soul. It is the story of people caught in that storm and the lives both ruined and glorified in its passage. Her description of the flooding of the Ninth Ward is Faulknerian in its power. It’s a hell of a book and worthy of the storm and times it describes.””