The Heart of It All
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
"Deeply moving and beautifully written. I couldn't put it down." — Jesmyn Ward, author of Sing, Unburied, Sing
"For anyone who believes, as I do, that the best hope for our fractured country is local, not national, Christian Kiefer’s new novel The Heart of it All will provide a welcome balm for the spirit. Here are people worth spending time with, not because they’re perfect, but because they’re not. What’s wrong with them isn’t nearly as consequential as how hard they fight for a better life, and not just for themselves. You set the book down and think, ‘This is what we’re made of.’ Or should be."—Richard Russo, author of Somebody’s Fool
A small, declining town in Ohio. A family bereaved by terrible loss. A searing narrative about how American lives touch each other across divides both real and imagined...
Set in failing small town in central Ohio, The Heart of It All asks how one manages, in an America of increasing division, to find a sense of family and community.
Focusing on the members of three families: the Baileys, a white family who have put down deep roots in the community; the Marwats, an immigrant family that owns the town’s largest employer; and the Shaws, especially young Anthony, an outsider whose very presence gently shakes the town’s understanding of itself.
A gorgeous, stirring novel in the classic vein of Richard Ford, Marilynne Robinson, Richard Russo, and Kent Haruf, The Heart of It All asks the reader to consider an America both divided and bound by its differences.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kiefer's sublimely crafted latest (after Phantoms) explores the contradictions and struggles of life in a small Ohio town during the Trump administration. Tom and Sarah Bailey have just lost their six-month-old son to a heart condition, a tragedy that sets the novel's tone and brings its various characters together: "Death brought casseroles... many warm from the oven, others cold so that their foiled tops wept with moisture," Kiefer writes. The cast includes the two older Bailey children, who navigate the vagaries of adolescence in a place where everyone knows each other's business; Khalid Marwat, the Pakistani owner of the transformer parts factory where Tom works as foreman; Khalid's wife, Rafia; and their son and daughter. The Marwats face routine bigotry (at one point, their property is strewn with toilet paper by neighbors who embrace Trump's xenophobic rhetoric). There's also Mary Lou, the factory's administrator, who is overweight and unhappily living with her mother, and Paula, one of the few Black people in town, who is passed over for a deserved promotion at the local Kroger's grocery store. In chapters from alternating points of view, Kiefer touches on themes of friendship and animosity, love and abuse, faith and racism, showing how the characters are bound together and driven apart by their circumstances. It's an exquisitely wrought and insightful look at how people deal with misfortune and inequities.
