ABOUT THIS AUTHOR...

ANDREW PORTER is the author of the story collection The Theory of Light and Matter, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he has received a Pushcart Prize and a Michener-Copernicus Fellowship. His work has appeared in One Story andThe Threepenny Review. He teaches at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.

ABOUT THIS BOOK...

An exceptionally engaging first novel from a commanding new voice in fiction, author of the award-winning and widely acclaimed story collection The Theory of Light and Matter.

The Harding family is teetering on the brink. Elson—once one of Houston's most promising architects—is recently divorced from his wife of thirty years, Cadence. Their grown son, Richard, is still living at home: driving his mother's minivan, working at a local coffee shop, resisting the career as a writer that beckons him. But when Chloe Harding gets kicked out of her East Coast college, for reasons she can't explain to either her parents or her older brother, and returns to Houston, the Hardings' lives begin to unravel. Told with piercing insight, taut psychological suspense, and the deftness of a true master of character, this is a novel about the vagaries of love and family, about betrayal and forgiveness, about the possibility and impossibility of going home.