In this debut collection, tangled bonds of love and family collide with a natural world both fragile and ferocious. Upended by grief, a widowed veterinarian seeks solace by fostering a litter of orphaned opossums. A young lawyer embarks on an affair, only to fall into a deeper, stranger entrancement with her lover’s nine-year-old daughter during a weekend on the Lake Huron coast. In the depths of a Wisconsin winter, a recovering alcoholic risks everything to plot a careening course toward atonement. And in the title story, two teenagers steal a car, discover a loaded rifle in the backseat, and set off consequences both devastating and tender for a series of strangers they’ll never meet. Set across the Midwest and rural Appalachia, the stories in Joyriders offer a resonant vision of rural and small-town life: lonely, half-haunted landscapes are pierced with moments of light, and even the most taciturn faces conceal inner worlds both rich and strange. Comfort and heartache
