From critically acclaimed author Steve Yarbrough comes this riveting, beautifully nuanced, new novel of life in a small town. After twenty-five years away and an illicit scandal in California, Dr. Pete Barrington is returning home to Loring, Mississippi, where football rules and religious piety mingles uncomfortably with darker human impulses. Though Barrington sets up a small practice and finds solace in an old friend, his wife, Angela, and daughter, Toni, are having trouble adjusting. Also, Barrington’s homecoming has awakened difficult memories for Alan DePoyster, a former high school classmate and now a pillar of the community, who blames Barrington for tearing apart his family. When DePoyster’s son and Barrington’s daughter begin a fledgling relationship, the children are forced to pay for their parents’ sins, and things take a disastrous, even shocking turn.
Set against a backdrop of the current political and cultural upheaval in the US and Eastern Europe, The Unmade World is a thoughtful, scope-y literary novel with a dose of suspense that moves from Poland to California to the Hudson Valley and back to Poland. It covers a decade in the lives of an American journalist and a Polish small businessman turned petty criminal and the wrenching aftermath of an accidental, tragic encounter between these two on a snowy night in 2006 on the outskirts of Krakow. The accident costs the lives of the American journalist Richard Brennan’s wife and daughter, an event that colors the rest of his life. It also leads to a downward spiral for Bogdan Baranowsk, leaving emotional scars as he suffers the seemingly inevitable loss of his business, his home, and his wife. The Unmade World is a story of ordinary, otherwise decent people from various backgrounds and circumstances who must learn how to live with the personal grief, sense of guilt, and the emotional consequences of violence. Along the way, the novel grapples with a spectrum of cultural and political issues. It includes a murder mystery wrapped around the corruption of major college sports, the pressures on immigrants and refugees in both the US and Poland, the fallout of political change, economic upheavals and armed conflicts--including the horrific destruction of Luhansk, Ukraine in 2014. It also references the 2016 presidential campaign, cultural politics in the American university, and the demise of print journalism, etc., though never in a dogmatic or overtly partisan way.
A Washington Post Notable Book When Kristin Stevens loses her job at a prestigious California university, she and her husband, Cal, relocate to suburban Massachusetts, where Kristin is forced to take a position at a third-tier college. She becomes entangled in the internal politics of academia, while Cal spends his days alone, fixing up their new home. Soon, Kristin finds herself drawn to their younger neighbor, first as platonic confidants bound by a love of literature and then, inevitably, as something more. In The Realm of Last Chances, Steve Yarbrough gives us a richly nuanced portrait of relationships, loneliness, and a marriage, reinvented.
In a small town in the Mississippi Delta, Luke May teaches local history to students too young to remember the turmoil of the civil rights era. Luke himself was just a child in 1962 when James Meredith’s enrollment at Ole Miss provoked a bloody new battle in the old Civil War. But when a long-lost friend suddenly returns to town, bringing with her a reminder of the act of searing violence that ended her childhood, Luke begins to realize that his connection to the past runs deeper than he ever could have imagined. An intricate novel of family secrets, extramarital affairs, and political upheaval, Safe from the Neighbors is a magnificent achievement.
In 1902, in a small community deep in the Mississippi Delta, nearly a generation after the end of slavery, events obscured by time but impossible to forgive or forget echo in the lives of blacks and whites alike. As bound together by history as they are separated by mutual distrust, the citizens of Loring face present tensions as they look toward an uncertain future. Into this charged atmosphere rides Tandy Payne–prodigal son of a prominent planter and brother of the current mayor, and a dissolute gambler looking to reclaim the family estate. When he takes advantage of a perceived slight from the town’s black postmistress, the ensuing clash with his principled brother results in a harrowing confrontation. Fueled by dark and brutal memories, their familial dispute quickly spreads through the countryside. Steve Yarbrough confronts character with morality, reason with blood, in this moving novel that explores the farthest boundaries of human nature.
A heart-stopping story, written with grace and lucidity, located at the dead center of Southern mythology and an intransigent national trauma. In a small community deep in the Mississippi Delta, black and white alike struggle to coexist as the era of Reconstruction gives way to Jim Crow.
After a childhood in Mississippi marred by a horrific family scandal, teenage sisters Ella and Caroline Cole escape their hometown, losing all connection to each other. While Ella finds stable domesticity in Boston, Caroline travels the world, from California to Poland, fleeing regrets and a man intent on violence. Despite the decades apart, each sister is never far from the other's thoughts. Then, one day, Ella walks into a bookstore and sees a novel called Stay Gone Days. Will this novel, a heartbreaking tale of estranged sisters, help Ella and Caroline find each other and start down the hard road of reconciliation and forgiveness?
The Mississippi that he writes about is not one of racist sheriffs and magnolias but offshore gambling and movie stars and forty-dollar steaks." -- Lewis Nordan.
It is 1943, and the war has come home to Loring, Mississippi. As German POWs labor in the cotton fields, the local draft board sends boys into uniform, and families receive flags and condolences. But for Dan Timms, just shy of 18, the war is his ticket out of town and away from the ghosts that haunt him. As he peddles goods from a rolling store for his profiteer uncle, Dan tries to understand his friend L.C., a young man who, on account of his skin, feels like a prisoner himself. But one day, Dan spots Marty Stark who has just returned from Italy, mysteriously reassigned to guard the POWs he was once trained to kill. As Dan soon learns, Marty’s war is far from over and threatens to erupt again.
For decades, movies and television shows have portrayed FBI agents as fearless heroes leading glamorous lives, but this refreshingly original memoir strips away the fantasy and glamour and describes the day-to-day job of an FBI special agent. The book gives a firsthand account of a career in the Federal Bureau of Investigation from the academy to retirement, with exciting and engaging anecdotes about SWAT teams, counterterrorism activities, and undercover assignments. At the same time, it challenges the stereotype of FBI agents as arrogant, case-stealing, suit-wearing stiffs with representations of real people who carry badges and guns. With honest, self-deprecating humor, Steve Moore's narrative details his successes and his mistakes, the trauma the job inflicted on his marriage, his triumph over the aggressive cancer that took him out of the field for a year, and his return to the Bureau with renewed vigor and dedication to take on some of the most thrilling assignments of his career. Steve Moore is a former agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation who had assignments as a SWAT team operator, sniper, pilot, counterterrorist, and undercover agent. He received multiple awards from the Department of Justice before his retirement in 2008, has written two episodes for an FBI-themed TV series, and is a regular commentator for Headline News. He lives in Thousand Oaks, California.
In Crying for a Vision, British-born poet, musician and performance artist Steve Scott offers a challenge to artists and a manifesto for the arts. This new edition includes an introduction and study guide, four newly-collected essays and an interview with the author. Steve Scott is the author of Like a House on Fire: Renewal of the Arts in a Post-modern Culture and The Boundaries. "Steve Scott is a rare individual who combines a deep love and understanding of Scripture with a passion for the arts." -Steve Turner, author of Jack Kerouac: Angelheaded Hipster. "Steve Scott links a number of fields of inquiry that are usually perceived as unrelated. In doing so he hopes to open wider possibilities for Christians in the arts, who may perhaps be relieved to find that, in many ways, they were right all along." -Rupert Loydell, author of The Museum of Light. Cover art by Michael Redmond
From critically acclaimed author Steve Yarbrough comes this riveting, beautifully nuanced, new novel of life in a small town. After twenty-five years away and an illicit scandal in California, Dr. Pete Barrington is returning home to Loring, Mississippi, where football rules and religious piety mingles uncomfortably with darker human impulses. Though Barrington sets up a small practice and finds solace in an old friend, his wife, Angela, and daughter, Toni, are having trouble adjusting. Also, Barrington’s homecoming has awakened difficult memories for Alan DePoyster, a former high school classmate and now a pillar of the community, who blames Barrington for tearing apart his family. When DePoyster’s son and Barrington’s daughter begin a fledgling relationship, the children are forced to pay for their parents’ sins, and things take a disastrous, even shocking turn.
In a small town in the Mississippi Delta, Luke May teaches local history to students too young to remember the turmoil of the civil rights era. Luke himself was just a child in 1962 when James Meredith’s enrollment at Ole Miss provoked a bloody new battle in the old Civil War. But when a long-lost friend suddenly returns to town, bringing with her a reminder of the act of searing violence that ended her childhood, Luke begins to realize that his connection to the past runs deeper than he ever could have imagined. An intricate novel of family secrets, extramarital affairs, and political upheaval, Safe from the Neighbors is a magnificent achievement.
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