Buckeye By Patrick Ryan

“Wise and heartbreaking” (Ann Napolitano), this captivating epic weaves the intimate lives of two Midwestern families across generations, from World War II to the late twentieth century.

In the small Ohio town of Bonhomie, a stolen moment of passion, sparked in the exuberant aftermath of the Allied victory in Europe, binds Cal Jenkins, a man wounded not in war but by his inability to serve in it, to Margaret Salt, a woman trying to obscure her past. Cal’s wife, Becky, has a spiritual she is a seer who can conjure the dead, helping families connect with those whom they’ve lost. Margaret’s husband, Felix, is serving on a Navy cargo ship; she will soon learn that he may have perished in a predawn attack in the Philippine Sea. 

As the country reconstructs in the postwar boom, a secret grows in Bonhomie, but nothing stays buried forever in a small town. Twenty-five years later, as another war convulses America, the consequences of that long-ago encounter set in motion a series of events that will upend the next generation of both families as they head toward a new century.

Sweeping yet intimate, rich with piercing observation and the warmth that comes from profound understanding of the human spirit, Buckeye captures the universal longing for love, and for goodness.