"The bestselling author of A Gentleman in Moscow and Rules of Civility and master of absorbing, sophisticated fiction returns with a stylish and propulsive novel set in 1950s America. In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed...

"Muriel is newly married and restless, transplanted from her rural Kansas hometown to life in a dusty bungalow in San Diego. The air is rich with the tang of salt and citrus, but the limits of her new life seem to be closing in: She misses her freethinking mother, dead before Muriel's nineteenth birthday, and her sly, itinerant brother-in-law, Julius, who made the world feel bigger than she had imagined. And so she begins slipping off to the Del Mar...

"It's the summer of 1959 at the foot of Bakers Mountain in western North Carolina when 13-year-old Jackie Honeycutt first bumps into Thomas Freeman fishing on the riverbank. They hit it off, and Jackie hopes the two of them can be friends. But Jackie is white, and Thomas is Black -- and Jackie quickly learns their growing friendship won't be easy. North Carolina is the focus of the growing civil rights movement, and through his friendship with Thomas,...