Winter's Bone

Winter's Bone is a novel by the American writer Daniel Woodrell, published in 2006.

Ree Dolly is sixteen and lives in rural poverty in the Ozarks with her two small brothers and a mother who is not able to look after them. Her father has put the family house up as security for his bail and then vanished while facing a charge of running a methamphetamine lab, and if he does not appear for his next court date they will lose the house they live in. Finding him means asking questions of the Dolly relatives and their neighbours, who do not want to be asked and who have their own rules about what a sixteen-year-old girl is allowed to want. Woodrell writes the book in a close, specific voice that stays inside Ree's life: the cooking, the cold, the woods and the obligations that go with a family name in that country.

The novel was adapted into a film in 2010, and Woodrell had been writing about the Ozarks for years before it appeared.