In the year between the Cuban missile crisis and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Dorrie Vane returns home to a small Montana town perched on an ocean of empty, ancient prairie—a prairie made potent by hundreds of buried nuclear missiles. Rima in the Weeds probes beneath the surface of Madrid, revealing the drama, emotion, even violence that emerges in the apparently unremarkable lives of its inhabitants.

In her dazzling second novel, Deirdre McNamer uses an enigmatic and haunting narrative voice—one that recalls Toni Morrison’s Jazz—to limn a story of three siblings who venture from their muffled Midwestern childhoods into the heedless 1920s….. Each of them yearns to fulfill the promise of a more exciting life in the brash, go-for-broke environment of America between the wars, where the most extravagant dreams can be had for the asking, and the most modest hopes can be dashed in a moment.

“One morning I stood on the back deck of our handsome house and I realized that my interior self, the self I did not present to the world or even to those closest to me, seemed to have burned out.” So confesses the narrator of Deirdre McNamer’s remarkable new novel. … Her voice is searching, specific, unsparing, and sometimes darkly funny. In the process of listening, we learn the answer to a modest mystery that rests on a larger one: what makes a fully lived, fully conscious life?

Red Rover is the story of three Montana men who are swept up in the machinations of World War II and its fateful aftermath.... two childhood friends, Aidan and Roland, join the FBI, while Aidan’s brother, Neil, becomes a B-29 pilot. After the war Aidan returns to Montana ill and emotionally shattered. On a cold December day in l946, he is found fatally shot—an apparent suicide that becomes illuminated, amplified, and fully put to rest only when Neil and Roland are very old men.