Bug Hollow

Ellis celebrates high school graduation by taking a road trip with a buddy before leaving for college on a scholarship. He meets a girl on the trip, Julia, and stays behind, making his mother worry that he’ll drop out of college to be with the girl. Ellis’s parents finally persuade him to come home, and he leaves for college. Five days later, he’s found dead, drowned in the limbs of a buried tree in a quarry. When Ellis’s parents discover that Julia is pregnant, they agree to raise her and Ellis’s baby alongside their own two daughters. Huneven (Search) invites readers to follow the tangled, often-troubled history of this complicated family, which, over time, spreads its arms to enclose still more characters, including an older neighbor who finally marries her lesbian lover and two people who’d had an affair in Saudi Arabia 30 years earlier and are now finally united. This transcendent novel has all the virtues associated with Huneven: attention to detail and a glimpse at how complicated the very act of living is.