After three years in Afghanistan, Otis is adjusting to life back home. Struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder, he obsessively replays the traumas of war, cataloging the names of the dead. Cat, his wife, is a genealogist who makes maps of families in an attempt to understand her world. When a car accident takes Otis’s left arm, he is grateful to bear a physical loss that makes his damaged emotional self visible. As he recovers, he and Cat confront the silences upon which their marriage is built.

I was struck by this novel’s wisdom and the hard-won ease with which it wears it. A book to read slowly, to savor and to return to.
Laird Hunt, author of Neverhome

Here is a visionary book that, long after it is finished, continues within the reader, inviting us to walk towards our most difficult questions. It is a place we need to go.
Selah Saterstrom, author of The Meat and Spirit Plan

Birman’s compassionate novel takes us behind closed doors into a world turned upside down but somehow familiar and totally real. How To Walk Away belongs in the same company as Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf and Hannah Weiner’s The Fast.
Lewis Warsh, author of One Foot Out The Door

Birman is a gorgeous storyteller with an ear for shaping language and a talent for creating people we learn to suffer with and love.
Margaret Randall, author of Che On My Mind and About Little Charlie Lindbergh