Stewart O'Nan

"In the first line of Ocean State, we learn that a high school student was murdered, and we find out who did it. The story that unfolds from there with incredible momentum is thus one of the build-up to and fall-out from the murder, told through the alternating perspectives of the four women at its heart. Angel, the murderer, Carol, her mother, and Birdy, the victim, all come alive on the page as they converge in a climax both tragic and inevitable....

Now a major motion picture from Warner Independent starring Sam Rockwell and Kate Beckinsale In Stewart O'Nan's Snow Angels, Arthur Parkinson is fourteen during the dreary winter of 1974. Enduring the pain of his parents' divorce, his world is shattered when his beloved former babysitter, Annie, falls victim to a tragic series of events. The interlinking stories of Arthur's unraveling family, and of Annie's fate, form the backdrop of this intimate...

This volume features twelve journeys into the lives and souls of a broad range of characters-including a ruined farmer, a black day laborer, an old Chinese grocer, and a young policeman who has become separated from his family and is descending into madness. Intimate and generous, these stories illuminate the connections that bind us and the obligations and sorrows of love. From The Speed Queen to Names of the Dead to West of Sunset, O'Nan has dazzled...

A year after the death of her husband, Emily Maxwell gathers her family by Lake Chautauqua in western New York for what will be a last vacation at their summer cottage. Joining is her sister-in-law, who silently mourns the sale of the lake house, and a long-lost love. Emily's firebrand daughter, a recovering alcoholic recently separated from her husband, brings her children from Detroit. Emily's son, who has quit his job and mortgaged his future to...

In The Odds, O'Nan crafts the moving, quirky tale of a couple desperately trying to save their marriage. Eagerly fleeing their Cleveland suburb, Art and Marion Fowler empty their bank account and head to Niagara Falls for a second honeymoon. By day they sightsee, but at night they play the odds at the roulette wheel in the hopes of fixing their flagging finances and marriage.

Early in 2004, two writers and Red Sox fans, Stewart O'Nan and Stephen King, decided to chronicle the upcoming season, one of the most hotly anticipated in baseball history. They would sit together at Fenway. They would exchange emails. They would write about the games. And, as it happened, they would witness the greatest comeback ever in sports, and the first Red Sox championship in eighty-six years. What began as a Sox-filled summer like any other...

In "A Face in the Crowd," widower Dean Evers sees faces from his past while watching baseball; and in "The Longest December," the Howard family struggles to see their kind and gentle neighbor James Wilkinson as the violent criminal the police are investigating.

Soldier, son, lover, husband, breadwinner, churchgoer, Henry Maxwell has spent his whole life trying to live with honor. A native Pittsburgher and engineer, he's always believed in logic, sacrifice, and hard work. Now, seventy-five and retired, he feels the world has passed him by. It's 1998, the American century is ending, and nothing is simple anymore. His children are distant, their unhappiness a mystery. Only his wife Emily and dog Rufus stand...