A story of family—whether the one you inherit or the one you create—bound together and torn apart in the struggle for a better world.Change rarely comes easily or without a fight. In her much-anticipated fourth novel Beverly Gologorsky takes a close, loving look at the members of a working-class family in the Bronx, each in their own way struggling for a better world. At the heart of the story is Josie, a young woman whose fraught relationship with her family is further stretched by her commitment to anti-Vietnam War activities and her deepening relationship with a rising star in the Black Panther Party. Her brother Johnny is a police officer, rough and judgmental. Closest in age to Josie is sweet Richie, who, inexplicably to her, has just become an enlisted soldier. Her sister Celia is pulled toward activism in the women's fight for equality, but paralyzed by fear for her eldest son who may or may not have blown up an enlistment center. Their lives intertwine...

As the Great Recession and the foreclosure crisis hit, four close friends who barely made it out of poverty in New York City's South Bronx, suddenly find themselves caught up in the economic maelstrom. Lena, Zack, Dory, and Stu must reconcile their troubled past with an uncertain future in Beverly Gologorsky's stunning new novel, a tapestry of working-class life in a world on the brink.

"The hard realities associated with growth, change, love, and death affect all, but the repercussions seem especially gritty in this working-class setting. Gologorsky’s writing is clean and spare as she gives each character her or his own specific voice and presents an unflinching, caring view of the world, well worth our time to see."—Danise Hoover, *Booklist* Ava, Mila, and Rosalyn all work at Murray's Diner in Long Island. They are friends and coworkers struggling to hold together their disordered lives. While Ava privately grieves the loss of her husband in the first Iraq War, Mila struggles to dissuade her seventeen-year-old daughter from enlisting in the second. Rosalyn works as an escort by night until love and illness conspire to disrupt the tenuous balance she'd found and the past she'd kept at a safe distance. The promise of a new relationship with a coworker soon begins to restore Ava's faith in her own ability to feel, and Mila learns through wrenching loss that children must learn from their own mistakes. But ultimately it is love–for one another and for their wayward families–that sustains them through the pain and uncertainty of a world with no easy answers. With tender, unadorned prose and a supremely human sympathy for the triumphs and defeats of everyday life, in this long-awaited second novel Beverly Gologorsky delivers a moving and incisive story about loss, friendship, and healing in the shadow of a seemingly endless war.**