Split Estate

Arthur King has lived in New York for all his adult life when his wife commits suicide one afternoon while he's away. Left alone with two teenage children, overwhelmed by the prospect of city life without his wife, Arthur decides to move the family to the small Wyoming town where he grew up. They are welcomed there by his mother, a tough, observant Western woman still clinging to the family ranch (while protesting local drilling companies on the side). In elegant, penetrating prose, Charlotte Bacon follows the surviving Kings through the course of a summer as they come to terms with the emptiness-and the openness-of their new landscape, and confront the grief that glares out at them everywhere. Split Estate is a heartrending portrait of a family uprooted and struggling to reconnect in a world irrevocably changed by loss.