https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/22/liz-moore-addiction-long-bright-river-interview

Long Bright River portrays the blight of addiction in Philadelphia and in a troubled family. The novelist explains how her own experience informed its story

Liz Moore took a fragment from Tennyson’s The Lotos-Eaters for the title of her exploration of family, geography and addiction, Long Bright River. The poet’s brother Charles was an opium user. “It’s a strange coincidence,” Moore says – but evidently fitting. Long Bright River, an emotional study of family dysfunction composed with the stylistic economy of a crime novel, was published last week to rave reviews. It takes place in the Philadelphia neighbourhood of Kensington, notorious as a virtual city-state of opioid addiction.

It’s here, in a once prosperous residential area fallen into dilapidation and dotted with abandoned buildings that Moore traces the story of two sisters, Michaela and Kacey Fitzpatrick, who are estranged but find themselves bonded by their choices – or lack of them. Michaela, or Mickey, is a cop and single mother whose concern for her younger sister becomes an obsession; Kacey is tightly locked in heroin addiction, and working the streets, so her preoccupations are, on the surface, elsewhere. Amid the daily toll of overdoses in the area, a series of murders raises the emotional stakes for Mickey and decreases the chances of survival for Kacey, who has disappeared.