Vlautin, Willy

This is literary art that will keep readers in their seats until the last page.

Vlautin's unerring ability to write without artifice or judgment about hardscrabble people trying to do good makes him the literary heir to the late Kent Haruf. This is a deeply compassionate story made more poignant for its unadorned simplicity, with an ending that lands with the emotional force of a Horace Hopper one-two punch.

Despite touching on urgent national issues such as health care and the death of the middle class, Vlautin's deeply sympathetic novel never feels labored or overtly political, telling its characters' stories in direct, unvarnished prose that recalls the best of John Steinbeck.