Kelley Shinn presents THE WOUNDS THAT BIND US, with Belle Boggs at Flyleaf Books

The improbable and powerful true story of a single mother with prosthetics for both legs who travels the globe with her young daughter in a Land Rover.

The Wounds That Bind Us is the improbable true story of Kelley Shinn, an orphan at birth who loses her legs at the age of sixteen to a rare bacterial pathogen. She becomes an avid off-road racer and, as a single mother, attempts to drive around the globe in a Land Rover with her three-year-old daughter in tow to bring light to the plight of land mine survivors. With unflinching honesty, exceptional lyricism, and biting humor, Shinn (“that’s two Ns and no shins”) takes readers on a wild journey—literal and emotional—filled with striking characters and landscapes, heartbreaks, and hard-won insights, ultimately arriving at a place of profound redemption.

Told with the energy and intensity of the adventure story it is, this terrifically rich and nuanced examination of a life is also a careful meditation on renewal—a remapping of the world. Guided by the narrator’s keen introspection and her ability to look resolutely at harrowing sorrows and still find hope, joy, and meaning, The Wounds That Bind Us will resonate deeply, long after the last page.

Kelley Shinn lives on Ocracoke, North Carolina, a remote island twenty-six miles from the coast. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Fourth Genre, Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, and elsewhere.

Belle Boggs is the author of The Gulf: A Novel; The Art of Waiting; and Mattaponi Queen: Stories. The Gulf was shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novel Prize and longlisted for the Crook’s Corner prize. The Art of Waiting was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay and was named a best book of the year by Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, the Globe and Mail, Buzzfeed, and O, the Oprah Magazine. Mattaponi Queen, a collection of linked stories set along Virginia’s Mattaponi River, won the Bakeless Prize and the Library of Virginia Literary Award and was a finalist for the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her stories and essays have appeared in the Atlantic, Orion, the Paris Review, Harper’s, Ecotone, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is professor of English at North Carolina State University, where she directed the MFA program in creative writing for six years, and she writes and edits the Frog Trouble Times, a Substack about parenthood and childhood during climate change, with her daughter, Bea. Her next two books are Plant Pets: A Kid-to-Kid Guide to Growing and Enjoying Houseplants (with Beatrice Allen) and History’s Outlaws: One Town’s Legacy, from Reconstruction through Black Lives Matter (with Sylvester Allen, Jr.).