by Adam Rapp
First published 2024
Thirteen year old Myra Larkin thinks she has met Mickey Mantle at a local diner in Elmira, New York during late summer 1951. The young man chats with her and drives her home. That same night, three people are murdered just down the street from the Larkin house. The crime opens decades of violence that will follow this large Catholic family. Myra grows up to work as a prison nurse while raising her son Ronan. Her sisters Lexy and Fiona end up on different sides of the class divide. Brother Alec, formerly an altar boy, gets thrown out of the family home and becomes a drifter. As Alec grows more isolated, his mother starts receiving postcards with threatening messages. What these cards reveal will destroy the family and force a terrible reckoning. The story follows each sibling as they scatter across America chasing their own version of success, but violence shadows them through the generations.
Genres: american-fiction, abuse, 20th-century, crime, 21st-century, family-drama
Vibes: dark, emotional, intimate, suspenseful
Tropes: unreliable-narrator
Setting: Elmira, New York
Period: 1951
480 pages · Hardcover · Little, Brown and Company
Content warnings: abuse, violence