Faith, family, and the weight of history intersect in this remarkable debut from a rising literary talent

A cold, gray Sunday dawns on New York City to find Paul Metzger trudging through the winter streets to visit his past. He goes first to see his estranged, decades-older half-brother; then his dying father, whose notorious early life still haunts his children; and finally the ex-wife he cannot help but continue to love. But a fourth encounter—violent, unexpected—sets in motion a chain of events that will forever change Paul’s life, as well as the family he’s struggled so long to understand.

Ian MacKenzie’s stirring and lyrical debut is a story of a family inalterably fractured by its past, of a man who refuses to believe that what is done cannot be undone, and of a world that insists—catastrophically, in the end—otherwise.