Buckeye
The international bestseller: 'It soars' Tom Hanks
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3.9 • 8 Ratings
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
'[A] luminous and tender 20th-century saga of wounded souls and small-town secrets' GUARDIAN
'A thing of wonder' CHRIS WHITAKER
'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 la Drang Valley. Buckeye is that book, and it soars' TOM HANKS
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THE BIG-HEARTED BESTSELLING PHENOMENON THAT READERS ARE CALLING THEIR BOOK OF THE YEAR
Cal Jenkins, wounded not in war but by his inability to serve in it, aspires to live a quiet, honest life in Bonhomie, Ohio. His wife Becky – intuitive, whimsical – senses danger long before she understands its shape. Across town, Margaret Salt carries secrets she's spent a lifetime burying, while her husband Felix tries desperately to be the man the world insists he must be.
Everything changes on V-E Day, when a single, stolen moment binds all four of them together. As wartime gives way to an uneasy peace, the consequences of that day ripple forward, pulling the next generation into its undertow.
But in a small town where nothing stays hidden, how long can the truth stay buried?
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'A glorious sweep of a novel' ANN PATCHETT
'Written in the key of Dickens … it's not just a great Midwestern novel, it's a great novel, period' FINANCIAL TIMES
'A poignant, powerful exploration of small-town America' INDEPENDENT, BOOK OF THE MONTH
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.
