Publisher's Synopsis
The breakthrough novel from one of the most talented and celebrated young novelists in America, "A marvellous book, written in a prose of a purity you don't come across much anymore. It gave me absolute pleasure, possessed me entirely while I was reading it, and hasn't faded in memory.' Jeffrey Eugenides, Guardian Books of the Year
One hot, dark night in Memphis, Walter Selby finds himself wandering alone in the parking lot outside a baseball stadium, trying to find his friend. Instead he finds his future wife, Nicole, illuminated by the headlights of a passing car. In that empty car-lot, the perfect setting for an archetypal American romance, they begin a long, lovely fall - into bed, into marriage, into parenthood, into responsibility.
A generation later Walter's son Frank, now a grown man himself, is also alone in Memphis, trying to find a trace of two parents who faded from view while he was still a child. His sister Gail is building a new family for herself on the other side of the continent, while his precious daughter Amy seems to slip further from him with each passing year. Frank's life seems to be racing away in a flurry of wrong decisions and lost moments, with nothing to show for it. And yet if Frank's life is anywhere, it is in his family, in these men and women, their lives and their passing. This is their story.
