Buckeye
The international bestseller: 'It soars' Tom Hanks
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4.5 • 42 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2025
A Read With Jenna Book Club Pick September 2025
One town. Two families. A secret that changes everything.
'Poignant, powerful' Independent
'Omniscient, sweeping, almost defiantly sentimental' New York Times
'It's not just a great Midwestern novel, it's a great novel, period' Financial Times
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MAY, 1945. As news of the Allied victory in Europe reaches the small town of Bonhomie, Ohio, a woman named Margaret Salt walks into a hardware store and asks the man behind the counter, Cal Jenkins, for a radio. What happens next will change both of their lives forever.
While the country reconstructs in the post-war boom, a secret grows in Bonhomie – but nothing can remain hidden in a small town. The consequences of that long-ago encounter will intertwine the fates of two families, rippling through the next generation and compelling them to re-examine who they thought they were and what the future might hold.
Full of compassion, humour and charm, Buckeye is a dazzling portrait of the human spirit by way of one unforgettable community; the twisted roads we take to achieve forgiveness and redemption; and above all a universal longing for love and connection.
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'I've been yearning for a novel that connects the American generations who dealt with our two Wars – one of Omaha Beach, the other of the Ia Drang Valley. Buckeye is that book, and it soars' TOM HANKS
'Funny and tender... Patrick Ryan has long been one of my favourite writers' ANN PATCHETT
'I love this novel with my entire heart … Wise and heartbreaking' ANN NAPOLITANO
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Two families live in the shadow of betrayals that bind them together in this big, powerful story set in the American Midwest. Cal Jenkins was kept out of World War II by a bad leg. After marrying the first woman he fell for, he finds his love tested when she begins exploring her paranormal abilities. Meanwhile, Margaret Salt is a woman with a lively past who falls for a handsome man whose secret life compounds his PTSD after he returns home from the navy. For a time, Cal and Margaret find comfort in each other’s arms, and their brief affair spawns consequences that echo for decades. Buckeye is a masterful exercise in large-scale storytelling, as Patrick Ryan weaves a massive cast of characters and events into an epic novel that is at once dramatic, thoughtful, witty and brisk. It’s an honest, relatable story about love and loyalty.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this heartfelt novel from Ryan (The Dream Life of Astronauts), a V-E Day kiss between two strangers reverberates across decades. In a small town in Ohio, Cal Jenkins is unable to serve in WWII because one of his legs is two inches shorter than the other. He enters a mismatched marriage with a medium named Becky Hanover, clerks in his father-in-law's hardware store, and fathers a child, Skip. A parallel narrative follows Margaret Anderson, who's raised in a series of foster homes before she meets and marries Felix Salt, an aluminum factory executive who volunteers for the Navy and serves on a cargo ship in the Pacific. Margaret is in Cal's shop when they both hear the news over the radio of Germany's surrender, prompting them to share an impulsive kiss, after which they embark on an affair. Felix returns home, and he and Margaret have a son named Tom, who becomes friends with Skip. The secrets of these enmeshed families come out years later, as Tom protests the Vietnam War and Skip enlists in the Army. The author's vision of small-town life is as timeless as Sherwood Anderson's or Thornton Wilder's, and is enriched by his complex and morally conflicted characters. Filled with wit and emotion on every page, this is a stirring paean to the joys and sorrows of family.
Customer Reviews
Beautiful
Beautiful story. Nuanced.