A stunning novel "with sentences like burning flags" (Annie Proulx) about a couple trying to rebuild their lives in their deteriorating coastal town.Up all night, Marlene drives the highways and back roads near her home in hopes that some landmark will spark an image of her daughter, one untainted by years of grief. Her husband Les steams out to sea in his effort to cope. He is a commercial fisherman on a boat staffed up with desperate loners and shape-shifting friends obliterating their bodies in two-week shifts of crushing labor. The couple keep their pain hidden from each other, and most of their lives separate. But as Les comes under threat on the trawler and Marlene's drives lead her into a tangled friendship with a local sex worker whom she becomes determined to protect, the couple is forced to acknowledge that they can no longer face their troubles alone. A powerful descent into an ink-black whirlpool of obsession and isolation...

A riveting and emotionally harrowing debut about two young brothers and their physically and psychologically abusive father—One of the Boys is 160 perfect, stunning pages by a major new talent.The three of them—a twelve-year-old boy, his older brother, their father—have won the war: the father's term for his bitter divorce and custody battle. They leave their Kansas home and drive through the night to Albuquerque, eager to begin again, united by the thrilling possibility of carving out a new life together. The boys go to school, join basketball teams, make friends. Meanwhile their father works from home, smoking cheap cigars to hide another smell. But soon the little missteps—the dead-eyed absentmindedness, the late night noises, the comings and goings of increasingly odd characters—become sinister, and the boys find themselves watching their father change, grow erratic, then violent. Set in the sublimely stark landscape of...