May We One Day Pick All the Shrapnel From Our Hearts

In this enigmatic debut novel, a middle-aged man named Bridger returns from an anonymous city to his hometown of Missoula to drive a sewage truck and contemplate the distant and fractured relationships in his life. No longer able to communicate with his nameless art curator wife, he is having an affair with a younger, seriously ill coworker while caring for his deaf eight-year-old daughter. With spare, measured prose and a poetic ear for the serene rhythms of everyday life, Shaenrayce Leigland's unflinching portrait of dark stoicism is also an elegiac meditation on tenderness and grace.