It's 1993 and Alec Thompson is traveling to Maine, to witness at the marriage of his painter friend, Webb Hartley. When Alec arrives at the wedding scene, he is surprised that no one-including Pru Mackenzie, Webb's 30-year younger bride-to-be-is on hand to welcome him. He soon learns the reason; his best friend has suffered a fatal heart attack, and the wedding is off. Webb's death sends Alec in search of Jenny Grant, Webb's first wife, to announce the news. The journey takes him from Webb's Maine farmhouse to a northern California horse ranch and leads him through both men's pasts, from college to the present. As he re-explores the events that had bound the three of them-both men had been rivals for Jenny's affection-Alec discovers, in the murky context of those days, that their lives were far more entangled than he had imagined. What Alec learns-and what Webb apparently wanted him to know-cuts to the very essence of the rest of Alec's life. Understanding what happened thirty years earlier is more important to him than ever. Along the way, Alec's quest introduces him to a precocious twelve-year-old, an ultra-sophisticated divorceé, a Native American psychic. All are part of Webb's legacy for Alec to comb his memory, and the memories of everyone still living, in order to realize the truth. Vivid, poetic, and written with the same care and craft as the author's elegant short stories, Splendid Omens is both understated and shocking-and a deeply beautiful book that examines how different versions of the truth are like holograms that can re-create a life.

Splendid Omens

Wilson, Robley

Literature & Fiction

Thomas Dunne Books

When Arlene and Paul Tobler gave up teaching careers to save the Tobler family farm, Arlene never imagined the eventual price of the move. Not hardship, not isolation, not even her own loneliness posed the greatest threat; it was the land itself that took away both love and livelihood. Robley Wilson's The World Still Melting tells the story of the Toblers and their friends Harvey and Nancy Riker, whose abusive marriage ultimately costs the Toblers their happiness, and Burton Stone, the man in the middle, whose affair with Nancy is the literal trigger of the novel's action. Good and evil play out on these three family farms, whose very existence is a vanishing part of a heartland giving way to corporate avarice. The Iowa of Wilson's novel is a place where keeping land and home has become a dehumanizing territorial battle, and where small farmers like Paul, Harvey, and Burton face the whims of governments, banks, and weather that bring drought one year and deluge the next. Writing with great compassion, honesty, and remarkable skill, Wilson shows here what happens to real people in a hard place, where the traditional world is slowly but steadily melting away.

The World Still Melting

Terrible Kisses (New Fiction)

Bantam Books (Transworld Publishers a division of the Random House Group)

The Victim's Daughter

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Mystery

Transworld Publishers, Ltd

In these collected short stories, the author charts the strange habits of love, the snap of sudden disaster, and the pain of growing older

Terrible Kisses: Stories

United States

Simon&Schuster

Returning home for her eagerly anticipated fifteenth anniversary high school class reunion, Lissa Cooper finds her father brutally beaten to death, and she must slowly come to terms with how his murder will forever alter her life

The Victim's Daughter: A Novel

"Why is it the worst things happen when you're most relaxed and your head's empty of everything serious?" These words, from the narrator of the story "Grief," are at the heart of The Book of Lost Fathers, the new collection of short fiction by Robley Wilson. These stories depict ordinary, recognizable people dealing with loneliness, loss, and mortality. A woman and her father experience an earthquake, and the incident reinforces the frailty of the dying man. A man must confront his fiancée's past when he realizes the identity of the "stranger" they meet on vacation. A best man arrives late for his friend's wedding, only to learn that the groom has died hours before. Combining an evocative and compassionate style with familiar characters and enduring messages, Wilson treats fundamental questions of love, suffering, and humanity. His "lost fathers" provide a common thread that weaves together stories about fathers, husbands, and lovers, past and present -- and the women whose lives they change.

The Book of Lost Fathers: Stories (Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction)

The Johns Hopkins University Press

Dancing for Men

This collection of short stories was the second recipient of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize.

University of Pittsburgh Press

Kingdoms of the Ordinary (Pitt Poetry Series)

Poems deal with grief, love, children, anger, aging, work, music, fall, the opera, animals, literature, women, and exile

Poetry

Univ of Pittsburgh Pr

Pleasure Tree (Pittsburgh Poetry Series)

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Books by Wilson, Robley