'A Brief History of the Flood' by Jean Harfenist

(disclaimer: I know the author. But I know several other authors with books out and you're not gonna see me talking about them.)

I'm a city boy, raised under the brilliant glow of success and possibility which I saw everywhere around me. This is a novel about someone who grew up in a place where possibility was barely a faint glimmer on the horizon.

It's a novel — there is a character, Lillian Anderson, who undergoes trial and changes as we watch. But it's written as a linked set of short stories (think Susan Minot) and so is episodic. Each of the stories closes you in more and more tightly, and in each one you see Lillian struggling harder and harder to get out. Unlike Ray Carver, who similarly wrote about isolated people on questionable roads, the love and respect the author has for these real characters comes through. But not at the expense of an acid point of view: "My sister is the kind of girl who thinks letting Buddy Franklin fuck her in the Hoffmans' hayloft is the same thing as a date"

It's a modern Huckleberry Finn, with the modern demons (family rage, the limits of class) replacing the more-concrete demons (bandits, slave-catchers) that Huck and Jim faced together. But both the characters—Huck and Lillian—share a saucy grit that pulls you toward them, and makes you know that wherever they are today, their demons are at least a little bit behind them. And because of that, the book matters.