BOOKSHELF

Jake came home to Pensacola Beach for a little quiet. What he got was a guesthouse behind Jill Dowd's place, a bourbon on the house from Ivy, the girl he left and never got over, and a Category 4 turning in the Gulf.

Jill's ex-husband is Mark Boyd: the governor's son, a lawyer, and the owner of a fleet of boats that come back heavier than they leave. Ivy knows what's on those boats, because Mark pays her to keep his clients happy. With the island under mandatory evacuation and thirty-six hours on the clock, three people with every reason not to trust each other set out to take Mark down, and to take his money on the way out. By landfall, somebody's in handcuffs, seven million dollars is riding north in a pair of duffel bags, and the love story isn't the one Jake thought he was in.

Danny Callahan is sixty-six, sober most days, and building a model train town in his basement where nobody leaves unless he decides they should.

His ex-wife Ruth, a retired nurse, has just signed up for an art class and discovered that what scares her most is becoming a footnote. Their daughter Hannah photographed wars, then came home to Pittsburgh for a safe life that is quietly coming apart. Their son Luke builds prosthetic legs for children hurt in other people's wars, and is about to find out who really owns his company.

Over one Pittsburgh winter, the Callahans fall in love, fall off the wagon, throw a punch, get bailed out, bury someone they love, and learn to fly. One of them literally.

Antique Bastards is a deadpan, big-hearted family novel about the people the world has filed under done, and why they refuse to stay there.

Desire lives in doorways. This book holds the moment before you cross, when the pull is all there is. It's poems, stories and photographs about wanting: love that shows up at 3:17 a.m. in yesterday's shirt with the wrong-sized apology, a marriage running on rationed sweetness, a lover's prayer that "must be boisterous and desperate."

The stories go wide. In "Nectarine Apartheid," a husband and wife fight a cold war over a fruit basket while the match on TV stays stuck at nil-nil. In "La Guerre Finit Quand On Danse," a French nurse and a Saxon soldier kiss mid-waltz in a shelled cellar in Lille, and the dance follows them from 1918 into Weimar Berlin. In "The Key of E," two Dublin thieves who met in the back of a police van settle old debts with Toblerone and a Steinway missing one note.

Then the book stops watching from the door and goes through it. The closing sequence is raw and unguarded: rage, hunger, and the terror of being left when the storm is over. What's left is a question: Happy! Happy?

Contains explicit sexual content.

Funny until it isn't. Strange until it's right. A slim book that does more in fifteen chapters than most do in three hundred pages. Wry, tender, and formally daring, Saudade is a novella about reinvention written in the key of Lisbon and magical realism. Equal parts fever dream and confession, in the tradition of Murakami.

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ii

The aliens show up. But is wasn’t what anyone expected.