Finalist, 2019 Weatherford Award (Fiction) • A Great Group Reads Selection for National Reading Group Month from The Women’s National Book Association

Set in Appalachian Ohio amid an epidemic of prescription opiate abuse, Michael Henson’s linked collection tells of a woman’s search for her own peculiar kind of redemption, and brings the novel-in-stories form to new heights. Maggie Boylan is an addict, thief, liar, and hustler. But she is also a woman of deep compassion and resilience. The stories follow Maggie as she spirals through her addictive process, through the court system and treatment, and into a shaky new beginning.

In these masterful stories, we rarely occupy Maggie’s perspective, but instead gain a multilayered portrait of a community as we see other people’s lives bump up against hers—and we witness her inserting herself into their spheres, refusing to be rebuffed. The result is a prismatic view of a community fighting to stay upright against the headwinds of a drug epidemic: always on edge, always human.

An interconnected web of lives in one midwestern city captures the surprising humanity of people searching for their authentic selves amid the 1990s drug crisis.

Amy Taylor finds the inner-city streets around her high school vibrant and animated compared to the bland middle-class neighborhood where she lives with her career-driven mother. In these streets, she meets the people of the city, among them a wayward boy named Jonathan, a struggling drug dealer, and Paul Lewis, a documentary photographer who becomes Amy’s mentor. Under his inspiration, she attempts to capture their world through the lens of her camera.

From the multiple perspectives of Amy and the expansive group of people she meets, award-winning novelist Michael Henson presents a heartbreaking portrait of the effects the Reagan-initiated drug war had on the young.