First published 2016
Sully has gained unexpected good fortune in recent years, but now a VA cardiologist delivers devastating news: he has only a year or two left to live. The weight of keeping this secret from everyone who matters proves exhausting. He struggles to hide the truth from Ruth, the married woman who has been his longtime lover, from his anxious best friend Rub Squeers, and from his son and grandson, relationships already strained by his years as an absent father. Meanwhile, Police Chief Doug Raymer obsesses over discovering which man his wife planned to leave him for before her accidental death. Mayor Gus Moynihan battles his own marital crisis, while Carl Roebuck watches his pattern of failing upward finally catch up with him. Charice Bond brings hope to Raymer's troubled department, though her brother Jerome threatens to derail everything. These flawed characters navigate hard times in upstate New York, their very human struggles binding them together in ways both painful and redemptive.
Genres: fiction, drama, literary-fiction, contemporary
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Upstate New York
Period: Contemporary
477 pages · Hardcover · Knopf
Content warnings: terminal-illness