Miller Cane: A True & Exact History
274 pages
September 15, 2026
PRE-ORDER NOW! Professional liar Miller Cane is making a killing traveling around the country running therapy groups for survivors of mass shootings—and business is booming.
| Hardcover | ISBN 9781639822362 | $39.00 |
| Paperback | ISBN 9781639822355 | $24.00 |
| eBook | ISBN 9781639822379 | $12.99 |
PRE-ORDER NOW!
Professional liar Miller Cane is making a killing traveling around the country running therapy groups for survivors of mass shootings—and business is booming. But just as his latest con is unfolding, he’s interrupted by a call from Lizzie, the woman he loves. It seems Lizzie’s in jail for shooting and wounding Connor, an abusive former lover—who wants custody of Lizzie’s eight-year-old daughter, Carleen. Lizzie is adamant: Miller must keep Carleen from Connor, taking her on the road with him in his battered old motor home.
Meanwhile, Miller’s former life as a history teacher and scholar catches up with him when his New York editor persuades him to contribute to a forthcoming history book. Miller takes Carleen to historical sites in the American West—from the Whitman Massacre site to the home of Laura Ingalls Wilder—and begins writing his textbook entries. But dealing as he is with the stress of parenting Carleen while evading Connor and other threats, Miller’s textbook sidebars become more and more . . . creative.
As the two drive toward their inescapable destiny, Miller the liar struggles to say something true that he can bequeath to this child he’s grown to love.
Miller Cane: A True & Exact History is set in our tumultuous present, swimming in violence and fraud, but it’s also about how we care for each other, even save each other, with a narrative drive and sense of humor in the tradition of other American road novels, from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to The Sisters Brothers. Painfully true and painfully funny, Miller Cane will take its place alongside such classics as True Grit and Paper Moon.
What Others Are Saying
Buckle up, gentle reader, Sam Ligon is about to take you on an outrageous road trip across American history and hysteria. It will be tempting to see your fictional guide on this journey, the massacre-counselor and unhinged textbook author Miller Cane, as an unreliable narrator, but it’s the American myth that’s unreliable in Sam Ligon’s razor-sharp satire. Oh, and there’s a chase. And a cat. And it’s hilarious.
Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins
Miller Cane is a jolt of straight-up, adrenalized American greed and violence. Sam Ligon’s prose is an elemental force—fierce and funny, profane and sacred—and his vision of the country’s past and present is as engrossing as it is unsparing.
Shawn Vestal, author of Godforsaken Idaho
Miller Cane races across the country with a young heiress in tow, tailed by two men with money on their minds. Samuel Ligon’s novel is an absurdist romp, a comic neo-Western odyssey of rescue and redemption. It is thrilling and heartfelt and humane.
Daniel Orozco, author of Orientation
