When Shakespeare Williams returns to his family's farm in eastern Colorado to bury his dead cat, he finds his widowed and senile father Emmett living in squalor. He has no money, the land is fallow, and a local banker has cheated his father out of the majority of the farm equipment and his beloved Cessna. With no job and no prospects, Shakespeare suddenly finds himself caretaker to both his dad and the farm, and drawn into an unlikely clique of old high school classmates: Vaughn Atkins, a paraplegic confined to his mother's basement, Carissa McPhail, an overweight bank teller who pitches for the local softball team, and longtime bully D.J. Beckman, who now deals drugs throughout small-town Dorsey. Facing the loss of the farm, Shakespeare hatches a half-serious plot with his father and his fellow gang of misfits to rob the very bank that has stolen their future.

Mixing pathos and humor in equal measure, Gregory Hill's East of Denver is an unflinching novel of rural America, a poignant, darkly funny tale about a father and son finding their way together as their home and livelihood inexorably disappears.

Lev Grossman Reviews East of Denver

Lev Grossman is the book critic for Time Magazine and author of the New York Times bestsellers The Magicians and The Magician King, and of the international bestseller Codex. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Read his review of Gregory Hill's East of Denver:

East of Denver is a slow burn, but by the end it's burning hot: you?ll leave this book a little charred. It begins with Shakespeare Williams (never mind, it's a long story) coming back to his hometown of Dorsey--a tiny agricultural flyspeck that is, yes, east of Denver--to take care of his father, Emmett, who's in the process of succumbing to senility while the family farm falls down around his ears. Shakespeare has no job and no prospects. He spends much of his time tinkering with machinery and chatting with his demented dad, and their conversations are the heart of the book. They?re a comedy duo, part Laurel and Hardy, part Vladimir and Estragon. Emmett's mind wanders as they talk, to the point where you think he's lost the thread completely, then all of a sudden he zeroes back in and whops Shakespeare with a massive punch line. There's black despair underlying every word they say, but it never overwhelms the humor.

Not much else goes on in Dorsey. When he's not with his dad, Shakespeare hangs out with old friends from school, like Carissa (the world's only fat anorexic) and Vaughn (a paraplegic), who are going nowhere about as fast as he is. (Nobody in Dorsey is in mint condition. Shakespeare himself is anosmic, meaning he has no sense of smell.) There's only the barest ghost of a plot, involving Emmett's failing finances, a quarter-serious plan for a bank heist, and a stolen plane, but the characters and the voices are so strong that a ghost is all the book needs. The losers chat, and the farm slowly gives in to entropy and goes dark, and you hang on every word. This is writing on a par with that of top-flight black-comic novelists like Sam Lipsyte and Jess Walter, and it deserves to be read. --Lev Grossman

(Photo © Elena Siebert)

Read more expert reviews of East of Denver

Recommended to book clubs by 0 of 0 members.