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Buckeye: A Novel - Softcover

Ryan, Patrick

 
9798217154234: Buckeye: A Novel
Softcover
ISBN 13: 9798217154234
Verlag: Random House LLC US, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK AS FEATURED ON TODAY • “A glorious sweep of a novel” (Ann Patchett) that weaves the intimate lives of two midwestern families across generations, from World War II to the late twentieth century.

“Mesmerizing.”—People
“Captivating.”—The New York Times Book Review
“A once-in-a-decade novel . . . I fell in love with these characters.”—Jenna Bush Hager

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, NPR, People, Minnesota Star Tribune, New York Post, Chicago Public Library

FINALIST FOR THE OHIO BOOK AWARD • LONGLISTED FOR THE JOYCE CAROL OATES PRIZE AND THE MARK TWAIN AMERICAN VOICE IN LITERATURE AWARD

That, as he saw it now, was his life’s work: trying to make right what he’d gotten wrong. Wasn’t that a fair measure of a person, what they did with their mistakes?

In the jubilant aftermath of the Allied victory in Europe, Cal Jenkins, a man wounded not in war but by his inability to serve in it, shares a single, life-altering moment with Margaret Salt, a woman determined to outrun her past. Cal is married to Becky, whose spiritual gifts help the living speak to the dead, while Margaret’s husband, Felix, is serving at sea, believed to be safe—until a telegram suggests otherwise.

What begins as a fleeting transgression becomes a complex secret that irrevocably binds all four of them in unexpected ways. As their small Ohio town remakes itself in the postwar boom, the Salt and Jenkins families remain in each other’s orbit, and the consequences of choices made long ago begin to emerge, reshaping their lives in ways that will forever impact the next generation.

Sweeping yet intimate, resplendent with moments of deep emotion and unforgettable characters, Buckeye is a transportive story of love, loyalty, sacrifice, and forgiveness.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Patrick Ryan is the author of the story collections The Dream Life of Astronauts (named one of the Best Books of the Year by the St. Louis Times-Dispatch, Literary Hub, Refinery29, and Electric Literature, and longlisted for The Story Prize) and Send Me. His work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, the anthology Tales of Two Cities, and elsewhere. The former associate editor of Granta, he is the current editor-in-chief of the literary magazine One Story. He lives in New York City.

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Chapter One

Cal Jenkins was born in the spring of 1920 with one leg shorter than the other. Just two inches shorter, but that was enough to make plenty of things difficult. Balancing on a bicycle took twice as long for him to learn as it did for other kids. Track and field was out of the question. So was walking without a pronounced limp or going up and down a set of stairs without securing himself on the railing until his father, amateur carpenter and junk collector, improved Cal s condition by carving a new, thicker sole out of tire rubber and nailing it onto his left shoe. At school, boys made fun of the way Cal walked, then made fun of the shoe with the extra-thick sole (someone noticed within an hour of the first day he wore it). But one boy flush-cheeked and small for his age pulled Cal aside during morning assembly and told him he was unique in God s eyes. I know, the boy said, because I am too. I can t touch my toes, you see. I have unusually tight hamstrings. He bent over to demonstrate, and his fingertips barely reached his kneecaps. We re each meant for a special thing, the boy said, and when Cal asked what his special thing was, the boy shrugged and said the two of them would have to wait to find out.

What they found out separately, and years later, after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and threw the country into a panic, after young men stopped waiting for their numbers to be drawn and began to volunteer was that having one leg two inches shorter than the other was enough to make a person unfit for military service, while having unusually tight hamstrings wasn t. That boy, Sean Robison, was sent from Ohio to Mississippi for basic training, and was then sent to Tunisia, and from Tunisia to Sicily, and from Sicily to Germany, where he was shot through the neck in the Hürtgen Forest while reloading his rifle and reciting the Lord s Prayer. Cal remained in his hometown and got a job in a concrete plant. He read comic books and adventure novels into his twenties. He married a local girl named Becky and eventually went to work in her father s hardware store. Sometimes he wondered if he would ever discover what his special thing was his purpose, he d decided especially in the face of a world war that wouldn t have him. He was so conscious of not being overseas that he found his limp worsening all by itself. He told people about his leg, people who hadn t asked and didn t care. Sometimes he even pointed to his shoes, ordered now from a medical supply company in Dayton. My condition causes hip problems, he d say. Which was true, though he had yet to experience any.

Bonhomie had been founded in a northwest pocket of Ohio in 1857 by a small group of merchants and their families, on land transformed by the Last Ice Age, when a glacier nudged its way down from Canada and melted, creating not only Niagara Falls and the Great Lakes, but also a vast swamp across the top of Ohio and Indiana that took thirty years to drain and left behind soil densely ripe for farming. The town was built with local lumber, shale, and limestone, and with granite from North Carolina, marble from Vermont and Colorado, and steel from Pennsylvania all of it brought in by rail. For a time, the town was a grid of nine streets, four running north south and five east west. The population grew from within as much as it could manage, and from without as much as it needed to. It swelled with migrant workers and their families during harvest time corn and wheat and tomatoes and sugar beets and shrank again when the workers moved on. Others moved into the area for the jobs created by the factories that sprang up around Hancock County. Immigrants from Italy, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Russia, and many other countries were proc

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Verlag
Random House LLC US
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 13 
9798217154234
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
464
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Van Ditmar Boeken, VDB Sales
sales@vanditmar.nl

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