by Dan Chaon
First published 2004
In 1977, a Doberman attacks a small boy. In 1966, a pregnant teenager enters a maternity home to give up her baby. In 1991, a young man slides into drug dealing while hoping for better. In 1997, another child vanishes from his grandmother's yard on a summer morning. These four moments span decades in the prairie Midwest, but they connect in ways the characters cannot see. Jonah grows up never knowing his birth mother. Troy drifts through dead-end jobs and bad choices. Loomis searches for the son he gave away. Their paths cross and separate across small towns where everyone knows your business but no one knows the whole truth. Dan Chaon weaves their stories together, moving between past and present to show how adoption, abandonment, and the search for identity shape ordinary people in extraordinary ways. Each character struggles with questions they cannot answer about who they are and why their lives turned out this way.
Genres: american-fiction, contemporary, adoption, family-drama
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Midwest, Prairie
Period: 1966, 1977, 1991, 1997
Mass Market Paperback · Ballantine Books