Pepperleaf

From the author of Below the Falls, Ross McMeekin's novel, Pepperleaf, explores a year in the life of five Pacific Northwest suburbanites whose worlds weave together through fraught circumstances such as a failing marriage, an unplanned pregnancy, a religious bereavement, and a father of two's cancer diagnosis. Embodying the spirits of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, and Elizabeth Strout's fictional town of Crosby, Maine, McMeekin's suburb of Pepperleaf is home to dozens of idiosyncratic characters who illuminate a piece of overlooked America. In spare, polished prose and delivered with wry, deadpan humor, Pepperleaf mines the quirks and unmet desires of a 'burb between the big city and the trees, written to find its earnestness, depth, and meaning.