Midwestern movie house owner Virgil Wander is "cruising along at medium altitude" when his car flies off the road into icy Lake Superior. Virgil survives but his language and memory are altered and he emerges into a world no longer familiar to him. Awakening in this new life, Virgil begins to piece together his personal history and the lore of his broken town, with the help of a cast of affable and curious locals--from Rune, a twinkling, pipe-smoking,...

"A debut novel about an odd assortment of residents living in a crumbling apartment building in the post-industrial Midwest"-- Provided by publisher. The automobile industry has abandoned Vacca Vale, Indiana, leaving the residents behind, too. In a run-down apartment building on the edge of town, commonly known as the Rabbit Hutch, a number of people now reside quietly, looking for ways to live in a dying city. Apartment C2 is lonely and detached....

The unforgettable story of a mother's struggle to find the courage to save her children from cruelty and unhappiness. When Ellen Grier's husband loses his job, she has little choice but to agree to his suggestion that they and their children move in with his parents on Vinegar Hill. Their new home is more stifling than she feared - a loveless place where dark secrets lurk behind a facade of false piety, and calculated cruelty is routine. Ellen's spirit...

For more than thirty years, Edie and Richard Middlestein shared a solid family life together in the suburbs of Chicago. But now things are splintering apart, for one reason, it seems: Edie's enormous girth. She's obsessed with food—thinking about it, eating it—and if she doesn't stop, she won't have much longer to live.
When Richard abandons his wife, it is up to the next generation to take control. Robin, their schoolteacher daughter, is...

Ex-military investigator Jack Reacher is called in by James Barr, a man accused of a lethal sniper attack that leaves five people dead, and teams up with a young defense attorney to find an unseen enemy who is manipulating events.

"From a helicopter high above the California desert, a man is sent free-falling into the night. On the streets of Portland, Jack Reacher is pulled out of his wandering life and plunged into the heart of a conspiracy that is killing old friends ... and the people he once trusted with his life. Reacher is the ultimate loner--no phone, no ties, no address. But a woman from his old military unit has found him using a signal only the eight members of their...

Describes a large modern mid-western family who belong to a church that doesn't permit drinking, dancing, or television and discusses their individual reactions when two siblings leave the faith for the temptations of modern culture.

"Set in Iowa and Minnesota in the 60s and 70s, Little Miseries is a Midwestern Gothic where sometimes the misery is just that--little--and sometimes it is epic and yawning, capable of swallowing every childhood memory. There are the miseries the Castles will talk about--old family lore about a great, great, great uncle who was split in two while connecting railroad cars--and the misery none of them will face. There are days at the lake, placid except...

"In Island City, a wry, wistful woman, estranged from her family, sells her belongings and moves back to her hometown in the Midwest. To her, it's the "perfect place to give up." She wants to get rid of everything-her stuff, her ambitions. Before making a "messy exit," she holes up in a dark bar and tells her stories to an audience of indifferent strangers. There's the time the river dried up and you could walk across its bed; the day her sister got...