"Drury is a truly great writer."-- Esquire "A beguiling novel . . . perceptive and captivating."-- The New York Times "Startling and utterly original."-- Newsday In this mesmerizing novel, Tom Drury once again journeys to the quiet Midwest to spend an action-packed October weekend in the lives of a precarious family whose members all want something without knowing how to get it: for Charles, an heirloom shotgun; for his wife, Joan, the imaginative life she once knew; for their young son, Micah, a knowledge of the scope and reliability of his world, aided by prowling the empty town at night; and for Joan's daughter, Lyris, a stable foot from which to begin to grow up. Sometimes together, sometimes crucially apart, father, mother, son, and daughter move through a series of vivid encounters that demonstrate how even the most provisional family can endure in its own particular way. About author(s): Tom Drury is also the author of The End of Vandalism , Hunts in Dreams , The Driftless Area , and The Black Book . His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker , Harper's Magazine , and The Mississippi Review , and he has been named one of Granta 's "Best Young American Novelists."