Eric Alwin has gone to visit his elderly father, a once commanding and charismatic Maryland senator who has seen his public service soured—and his family broken—by a sex scandal. Realizing that his own unfaithfulness, his disaffection with his career and marriage, seem to be a continuation of a family pattern, Eric is astonished to find his father proposing a bold expedition. The ensuing trip through the Deep South and the American heartland becomes both a journey into the emotional truth of the Alwin family and a breakthrough into a new kind of resilience and understanding, and love. Along the way, Eric will know anew not only his mother, Audrey, but his sisters, Alice and Poppy, and his own wife and son. As he discovers the surprising secret behind the scandal that defined his father’s fate, he will also realize what he must do to shape a more authentic and coherent life for himself.

Christopher Tilghman’s Roads of the Heart is a brilliant achievement by an author who, grappling with the strains and discords of contemporary American culture, achieves a special understanding of how family members love and lose and find one another every day.

The short stories of Christopher Tilghman are set against the enroached-upon yet still-expansive landscapes of our continent. From a Montana widow who marries her ranch hand to the aging patriarch of an old Maryland family on the Eastern Shore, Tilghman's characters bring to life the trials and bonds of belonging to one another—as lovers, as friends, as fathers. This collection of stories, the author's first book, is a deeply American work—composed with a keen sense of our past and our predicaments—but also a celebration of our resiliency. Writing in The New York Times Book Review, John Casey called In a Father's Place "a wonderful surprise . . . a beautiful book, making emotions as vivid and rich in perspective as a loved landscape."

Missing: seventeen-year-old Kai Dionne and his dog Talia. The search for these two spans a single day, morning twilight to late evening, from the time Kai leaps in a half-frozen river to save the dog to the hour he and Talia are recovered. Each person who comes to the river brings his or her secret needs and desires; each has known loss, and all are survivors: a homeless boy tries to find himself, his lost twin, his double; a childless mother grieves for her son and daughter; a man who shot his father recalls a tender, intimate night “when the father was kind, and not afraid, and not angry.” Kai and Talia belong to, and are loved by, a whole community. As strangers work together toward a single cause, they become family—bound by love not only to the ones lost, but to all who gather.

The perceiving consciousness is oceanic and atmospheric, embracing all living beings, swirling around a person, a bird, a bear, trillium blooming in dark woods, snow, stones, pines singing—moving closer and closer, loving, finally merging, sensing and knowing as one, before lightly whirling out again to embrace and love another. This powerful current of shared memory and experience, this ceaseless prayer, is a celebration of life, all life, mystery and miracle within an immense animate landscape, a song of praise, the voice of the river. Melanie Rae Thon opens a new genre: call it Eco Avant-Garde, a confession of faith, and a love song to the world.

Charged by lyrical prose and vivid evocations of a more-than-human world, Meteors in August proves itself a magnificent debut, a tale of despair and salvation in all their many forms.

Lizzie Macon is seven when her father drives a Native American named Red Elk out of their valley and comes home with blood on his clothes. The following year, her older sister, Nina, cuts her head from every family photograph and runs away with Red Elk’s son and their unborn child. Nina’s actions have consequences no one could have predicted: jittery reverberations of violence throughout the isolated northern Montana mill town of Willis. Sparks of racial prejudice and fundamentalist fever flare until one scorching August when three cataclysmic events change the town—and Lizzie’s family—forever.

In the unforgiving vortex of the American heartland, when you have to choose, you always choose life.

For Iona Moon, the open fields of the Kila Flats and the town of White Falls are centuries apart rather than the distance of a few miles. Mocked and feared by her classmates, Iona is only desirable to beautiful, brilliant Jay Tyler when they’re in the backseat of Willy Hamilton’s Chevy. Passion offers relief from the abuse of her older brothers and the sorrow of her mother’s slow surrender to cancer. But transient pleasures do not lead to grace—and Iona discovers she must escape everything she knows before she can learn to love the ones who have harmed her. Sensual, haunting, and tender, Iona Moon is a cry for independence, a demand for respect, and a realization that all worlds are cruel in their own ways.

This selection of Melanie Rae Thon’s stories showcases her breathtaking ability to become each one of her characters, to move inside the bodies and minds of the dispossessed. One woman speaks for them all: “I’m your worst fear. But not the worst thing that can happen.” In This Light shimmers with grace as a drunk young woman hits a Native American man on a desolate Montana road, a grieving slave murders the white child she nurses and loves, and two throwaway kids dance in the twinkling lights of a Christmas tree in a stranger’s house. Thon’s searing prose reveals that the radiant heat inside us all is the hope and hunger for love.

Ranging across a uniquely American landscape, from rural Idaho and suburban Arizona to downtown Boston, the eleven stories in this collection explore with painful lyricism the harsh awakenings of adolescence: eroticism and hypocrisy, love and violence, responsibility and guilt, adult inconstancy and the random cruelty of life and death.

Named one of the best young American novelists by Granta magazine, an award-winning writer presents a collection of dark, lyrical stories featuring working-class youths in pursuit of fleeting pleasures.

Through nine searing works of fiction, Melanie Rae Thon looks to the people who live in the borderlands, turning a keen and compassionate eye to those marginalized by circumstance and transgression. Taking us from the cobblestone streets of Boston to a deserted Montana road, from dance halls to hospital morgues, these urgent tales careen between the faults of the body and those of the mind, exploring the irruption of the past through the present, the sudden accidents and misguided passions that make it impossible to return to the safe territory of a former life.

The Girls on the Roof is a long narrative poem about a mother and daughter stuck on top of the roof of Crazy Eddy’s Café on the banks of the Mississippi River for three days during the 1993 flood. There, the two women discover that they’ve both had an affair with the same man.

In this exquisite memoir, critically acclaimed writer Mary Swander recounts her extraordinary trek from suffering to emotional, physical, and spiritual recovery. After a car accident left her almost completely paralyzed and in chronic pain with no medical cure in sight, Swander, a lapsed Catholic without any family to speak of, headed for New Mexico in search of the alternative medicine that the region is known for. Amid the stark beauty of the desert, she meets two unusual healers: Father Sergei, a Russian Orthodox monk who helps restore her faith, and Lu, a "curandera," whose herbal remedies help restore her body. Using her own transcendent experiences, Swander weaves an investigation into the history of healing and such mystics as Teresa of Avila, St. Francis of Assisi, and Hildegard of Bingen. Beautifully written, The Desert Pilgrim shows readers how to restore their faith in the modern world and how to believe in miracles again.