In the wake of a mass shooting at his daughter's university, gravedigger Joe Blankenship quits his job at Mountain View Cemetery in the fictional Appalachian town of Blackston, Virginia, cracks a beer between his knees, and drives to his home on the New River. There, with a summer storm rolling in, he collects his tools, feeds his donkey, and digs himself a grave.

From the dirt, Joe sits in the rain and relives his life in fragments: a lonely childhood, his aunt Carroll, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, blackberry cobbler, beers with his best friend, Ricky, summer jobs, fireflies, the birth of his daughter, the loss of his wife, Jennine, diapers, field trips, sleepovers, fights, marshmallows, and all the holes he's dug in between.

Dirt Pusher is both an elegy and a celebration, at its heart a reflection on a uniquely American tragedy through the eyes of a man who deals in the earthbound nature of death. In his debut novel, Daisy Cashin brings the hard-hitting lens of Brian Allen Carr's Opioid, Indiana and the coming-of-age tenderness of Aftersun to the hollers of Southwest Virginia.