Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside tells the story of two Americans living and teaching in rural China. The first, Thomas, is an entitled deadbeat, content to pass the rest
of his days in Asia skating by on the fact that he’s white, while the second, a recent college graduate named Daniel, is an idealist at heart. Over the course of the novel, these two characters
fight to establish primacy in Ningyuan, a remote town in the south of Hunan, with one of their more overzealous students, Bella, caught in between. In following the tribulations of these two
quirky expats, Quincy Carroll’s cleverly written debut novel examines what we bring from one country to another.
