“A thrilling, blistering tale of young love and old hate and the steady endurance of both.” —Lily King, author of Five Tuesdays in Winter“An epic love story . . . No greater reading pleasure to be had anywhere.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review When sixteen-year-old Cindra Zoeller is sent to a reform camp in Montana after being involved in an armed robbery, she is thrust into a world of mountains and cowboys and prayers and miscreants and people from all walks of life like she’s never seen in suburban Massachusetts. At Camp Challenge, she becomes transfixed by Lucky, a camp employee of mysterious origin—an origin of constant speculation—and the chemistry between them is instant, and profound. The pair escape together into the wilderness to create an idyllic life far from the reach of the law, living off their resounding love, Lucky’s vast knowledge of the wilderness, and a...

An ebullient, funny, and hugely original novel told from the perspective of Beep, a squirrel monkey who—with the help of a brilliant young girl— forges the way forward for a planet in crisis.​ In this immensely enjoyable and wise novel, it takes a sweet and personable squirrel monkey, Beep, to help us see the world we live in more clearly. While intending only to go deeper and higher into the Costa Rican rain forest to find a mate, he instead meets Inga, a kindly American tween on vacation with her family. Inadvertently, Beep travels to Manhattan with Inga. With her devoted help—and a bit of inspiration from a visiting Greta Thunberg, along with a dramatic zoo liberation—Beep manages to change the destiny of the world. He even finds his monkey love. Along the way, a vast cast of engaging and perceptive animals have a great deal to say about humanity and the divisions among us, our alien cities, our strange practices, our folly, as...

At seventeen, David “Lizard” Hochmeyer is nearly seven feet tall, a star quarterback, and Princeton-bound. His future seems all but assured until his parents are mysteriously murdered, leaving Lizard and his older sister, Kate, adrift and alone. Sylphide, the world’s greatest ballerina, lives across the pond from their Connecticut home, in a mansion the size of a museum, and it turns out that her rock star husband’s own disasters have intersected with Lizard’s—and Kate’s—in the most intimate and surprising ways.Over the decades that follow, Lizard and Kate are obsessed with uncovering the motives behind the deaths, returning time and again to their father’s missing briefcase, his shady business dealings and shaky finances, and to Sylphide, who has threaded her way into Lizard’s and Kate’s lives much more deeply than either had ever realized. From the football fields of Princeton to a stint with the NFL, from elaborate dances at the mansion to the seductions lying in wait for Lizard, and ultimately to the upscale restaurant he opens in his hometown, it only takes Lizard a lifetime to piece it all together.A wildly entertaining novel of murder, seduction, and revenge—rich in incident, in expansiveness of character, and in lavishness of setting—it’s a Gatsby-esque adventure, a larger-than-life quest for answers that reveals how sometimes the greatest mystery lies in knowing one’s own heart.Amazon.com ReviewAmazon Best Books of the Month, November 2012: I hereby nominate Lizard the humongous football player and Sylphide the mysterious ballerina as two of my favorite characters of 2012. Rarely have such elite and outsize personalities felt so true on the page--a joy to be with, worth rooting for. We meet Lizard at age 17, when his parents are murdered, setting up his decades-long search for the truth behind his father's shady business dealings and his family's weblike relationship with the couple in the mansion next door: Sylphide, the world's greatest dancer, and her rock star husband. Like early John Irving, Roorbach has crafted a story that's rollicking and sexy but not shallow or slight. Seven-foot Lizard and petite Sylphide, both giants in their own way, are a pair to behold. Part Gatsby, part Garp, Life Among Giants is an urgent tale of greed, love, and revenge. --Neal ThompsonFrom BooklistDavid “Lizard” Hochmeyer is enormous, nearly seven feet tall, and so is the labyrinth of tragedy and revenge he navigates in Roorbach’s novel. The high-school football star is headed to Princeton and then an NFL career when his parents are murdered. Both his and his sister’s lives are irreparably shaken and become significantly intertwined with the world-famous ballerina who lives nearby. Roorbach has created a memorable narrator who possesses the disarming frankness of Holden Caulfield and whose rapid-fire delivery and cutting characterizations expertly shift between memories and the present moment. Lizard keeps this part-mystery, part-coming-of-age-tale humming, as the cavalcade of revelations rolls by, prompting the reader to echo Lizard’s signature, “Whoa!” This is one of those novels you read because you care about what happens to the people and the connections between them as those connections grow, fray, and snap. By turns surreal and gritty, the book is written with the same muscular grace possessed by the dancers and athletes who are its main charaters. --Bridget Thoreson

Into Woods is an exuberant, profound, and often wonderfully funny account of ten years in the life of author Bill Roorbach. A paean to nature, love, family, and place, it begins with his honeymoon on a wine farm in France's Loire Valley and closes with the birth of his daughter and he and his wife's return to their beloved Maine. These essays blend journalism, memoir, personal narrative, nature writing, cultural criticism, and insight into a flowing narrative of place, a meditation on being and belonging, love and death, wonder and foreboding.

Great blue herons, yellow birches, damselflies, and beavers are among the talismans by which Bill Roorbach uncovers a natural universe along the stream that runs by his house in Farmington, Maine. Populated by an oddball cast of characters to whom Roorbach ("The Professor") and his family might always be considered outsiders, this book chronicles one man's determined effort—occasionally with hilarious results—to follow his stream to its elusive source. Acclaimed essayist and award-winning fiction writer Bill Roorbach uses his singular literary gifts to inspire us to laugh, love, and experience the wonder of living side by side with the natural world.

"One of the best novels of this or any year . . . A flat-out funny, sexy, and poignant romantic thriller." —David Abrams, author of FobbitThey're calling it the "Storm of the Century," so Eric stops at the market for provisions on his way home from work. But when the unkempt and seemingly unstable young woman in front of him in line comes up short on cash, a kind of old-school charity takes hold of his heart—twenty bucks and a ride home is the least he can do, right? Trouble is, Danielle doesn't really have a home. She's squatting in a cabin deep in the woods, no electricity, no heat, nothing but the nearby river to sustain her. She'll need food, water, firewood, and that's just to get her through the storm: there's a whole Maine winter ahead. So he gets her set up, departs with relief, climbs to the road, but his car has been towed with his phone inside, and the snow is coming down with historic speed and violence. There's no choice but to...

Through quirky plots, one-of-kind characters, and more than a few twists, the stories in Big Bend examine gentle-hearted men and their relationships. From made-in-heaven meetings to troublesome liaisons, Roorbach's characters experience romance in unexpected, sometimes disastrous ways.In "Fog," a teenage boy learns hard lessons about canoes, the Gulf of Maine, sex, and love. A struggling young artist goes home for the holidays in search of succor for the stomach—and heart—with poor results in "Thanksgiving." Other stories recount the ultimately disastrous reunion of estranged friends, an unemployed architect's foolish courting with bad company, and a middle-aged rock star's struggle with the urge to settle down. In the tiitle story, "Big Bend," a grieving widower, troubled by his own waning years, is tempted by a seductively attentive birdwatcher no older than his daughter.Poignant tales of hauntingly familiar situations, Bill Roorbach's stories are...