NOVELS
Is This love?
The year is 1974 and the Watergate hearings are underway. Peter Obata, age 28, graduate student in East Asian Studies at Stanford, is in a bar with friends, and a woman walks in alone wearing a provocative outfit and an air of “Don’t come near me.” Propelled by attraction, curiosity, and some measure of blind courage, Peter approaches her. By degrees, he and the enigmatic Margo get closer, though never as connected as Peter would like. So, when Margo starts leading him to places he never imagined he’d go, Peter goes. First chapter »
For Adam
“Something allies truth with death.”
“End the end so the beginning can begin.”
A novel that is something like a journal, woven together
with a Writer’s Journal (yes, it’s mine) about writing that novel. Nick,
the novel’s middle-aged narrator, starts his writing as a letter to his
estranged son, Adam, hoping to convey a father’s regrets, trying to tell
some significant things about Adam’s childhood and Nick’s own history
as well. At the crux of Nick’s story are his long-held secrets
that entangle themselves with romantic and family connections later in his
life. Nick writes the way he has felt himself to live, moving in and
out of reflection and creation. What troubles him and the narrative is
that what Nick invents seems more real – and more desirable – than
what he has lived. First chapter »
Over the Fence
There’s nothing out of the ordinary about Lucas Averill, a 35 year-old insurance adjuster living in Columbia, Missouri with his girlfriend Ellen. But his everyday life starts to come undone when he collapses, comes to in the hospital, rightly predicts that Ellen will leave him, and discovers that he’s being followed around by an invisible being with a bad cough. Within days, he stumbles across Allison, an apparition who becomes his lover and switches bodies with him. And things get weirder after that, as Lucas and the reader sojourn on the blurred boundary between inner and outer worlds. First chapter »
Never Let You Go
A novel about growing up – just the juicy stuff: love, sex, marriage, divorce, loyalty and betrayal. And the weather, from late fall to spring in St. Louis in 1963. The hot season is omitted; the characters, being seventeen years old, make up for that. Dal is the narrator Andy’s best friend, and has been since the second grade. They’re seniors in high school now, itching to get out of St. Louis and go on to the next chapter in life, and both of them are distracted by Toni, Claire, and Becca: from school, from their families, and even from their friendship for each other. First chapter »
From the Next Room
The story takes place seven years after Family Resemblances, and Karen is once again back in New Franklin for a summer visit with her unconventional Aunt Augusta. Aside from the town and Augusta’s house, hardly anything is the same, beginning with Karen herself. She has made it through college and found a job teaching high school, but she’s convinced that she is making a mess of life and especially of her first grown-up love affair, with Will, another teacher. A crisis hits Augusta and suddenly those problems don’t look so pressing. Urgently and almost without thinking, the two women call back to them what they put aside years ago, and both Allan and George resurface. First chapter »
Family Resemblances
Karen Moss at fifteen-plus has been sent by her parents to New Franklin, Illinois to stay with her mother’s younger sister, beautiful and quirky Aunt Augusta. Recovering from Rodge, who at sixteen dared to touch her breasts and then “gradually ceased to call,” Karen is at first impatient with her aunt’s habits, which include insomnia, baseball, an old Buick, and the family house. When Augusta starts teaching her niece how to drive and how to pay attention to baseball, and talking to her over late dinners about the attractions and pitfalls of adult love, the whole nature of the summer changes. Complicating the growing bond between these two are Augusta’s relationships with Jim, a married man with whom she’s having an affair, and her old boyfriend Jerry, who can’t seem to give up wanting her back. And then there’s George, a seventeen-year-old boy Karen meets at the town swimming pool . . . First chapter »