From Flannery O'Connor and Rona Jaffe Award winner Lori Ostlund, a deeply moving and beautiful debut novel about a man who leaves his longtime partner in New Mexico for a new life in San Francisco, launching him on a tragicomic road trip and deep into the mysteries of his own Midwestern childhood.Sensitive, big-hearted and achingly self-conscious, forty-year-old Aaron Englund long ago escaped the confines of his Midwestern hometown, but he still feels like an outcast. After twenty years under the Pygmalion-like direction of his partner Walter, Aaron at last decides it is time to stop letting life happen to him and take control of his own fate. But soon after establishing himself in San Francisco-where�he alternates between shoddy garage apartment and the absurdly ramshackle ESL school where he teaches-Aaron sees that real freedom will not come until he has made peace with his memories of Morton, Minnesota: a cramped town whose four hundred souls form a constellation of Aaron's childhood heartbreaks and hopes.After Aarons father dies in the town parade, it was the larger than life misfits of his childhood-a sardonic, wheel-chair bound dwarf named Clarence, a generous, obese baker Bernice, a kindly aunt preoccupied with dreams of The Rapture-who helped Aaron find his place in a provincial world hostile to difference. But Aaron's sense of rejection runs deep: when Aaron was seventeen, Dolores-Aaron's loving yet selfish enigmatic mother-vanished one night with the town pastor. Aaron hasn't� heard from Delores in more than twenty years, but when a shambolic PI named Bill offers a key to closure, Aaron must confront his own role in his troubled past and rethink his place in a world of unpredictable, life-changing forces.Lori Ostlund's debut novel is an openhearted contemplation of how we grow up and move on, how we can turn our deepest wounds into our greatest strengths. Written with homespun charm and unceasing vitality, After the Parade is a glorious new anthem for the outsider.

Product Description: On a small, unnamed coral atoll in the South Pacific, a group of troubled dreamers must face the possibility that the hopes they've labored after so single-mindedly might not lead them to the happiness they feel they were promised...read more

What if a balm for your greatest pain appeared in a lost corridor on the far side of a remote lake? Would you search for it? Or dismiss it as nonsense? Jake Palmer’s annual lake-house vacation with longtime friends was supposed to be relaxing—it was supposed to take his mind off his recent divorce.  But when he meets an elderly man early one morning on the lake, his world tips on its side. The old man claims there’s a forgotten corridor at the far end of the lake that few ever discover. But for those who do, and follow to where it leads, they’ll find answers to their deepest questions of loss. At first, the search just seems like a distraction. But does he really want to find it?The Long Journey to Jake Palmer explores profound loss and how to take hold of real hope when there seems to be none.

A multigenerational family saga about the long-lasting reverberations of one tragic summer by "a wonderful talent [who] should be read widely" (Edward P. Jones). In 1948, a small stretch of the Woodmont, Connecticut shoreline, affectionately named "Bagel Beach," has long been a summer destination for Jewish families. Here sisters Ada, Vivie, and Bec assemble at their beloved family cottage, with children in tow and weekend-only husbands who arrive each Friday in time for the Sabbath meal. During the weekdays, freedom reigns. Ada, the family beauty, relaxes and grows more playful, unimpeded by her rule-driven, religious husband. Vivie, once terribly wronged by her sister, is now the family diplomat and an increasingly inventive chef. Unmarried Bec finds herself forced to choose between the family-centric life she's always known and a passion-filled life with the married man with whom she's had a secret years-long affair. But when a terrible accident occurs on the sisters' watch, a summer of hope and self-discovery transforms into a lifetime of atonement and loss for members of this close-knit clan. Seen through the eyes of Molly, who was twelve years old when she witnessed the accident, this is the story of a tragedy and its aftermath, of expanding lives painfully collapsed. Can Molly, decades after the event, draw from her aunt Bec's hard-won wisdom and free herself from the burden that destroyed so many others? Elizabeth Poliner is a masterful storyteller, a brilliant observer of human nature, and in "As Close to Us as Breathing" she has created an unforgettable meditation on grief, guilt, and the boundaries of identity and love.""

Beginning in the 1980s, Elizabeth Tallent’s work, appeared in some of our most prestigious literary publications, including The New Yorker, Esquire, and Harper’s. Marked by its quiet power and emotional nuance, her fiction garnered widespread praise.Now, at long last, Tallent returns with a new collection of diverse, thematically linked, and deeply powerful stories that confirm her enduring gift for capturing relationships at their moment of transformation: marriages breaking apart, people haunted by memories of old love and reaching haltingly toward new futures. Mendocino Fire explores moments of fracture and fragmentation; it limns the wilderness of our inner psyche and brilliantly evokes the electric tension of deep emotion. In this audiobook, Tallent explores expectations met and thwarted, and our never-ending quest to avoid being alone.With this breathtaking collection, Elizabeth Tallent cements her rightful place in the literary pantheon beside her contemporaries Lorrie Moore, Ann Beattie, and Louise Erdrich. Visceral and surprising, profound yet elemental, Mendocino Fire is a welcome visit with a wise and familiar friend.