After a childhood in Mississippi marred by a horrific family scandal, teenage sisters Ella and Caroline Cole escape their hometown, losing all connection to each other. While Ella finds stable domesticity in Boston, Caroline travels the world, from California to Poland, fleeing regrets and a man intent on violence. Despite the decades apart, each sister is never far from the other's thoughts. Then, one day, Ella walks into a bookstore and sees a novel called Stay Gone Days. Will this novel, a heartbreaking tale of estranged sisters, help Ella and Caroline find each other and start down the hard road of reconciliation and forgiveness?

In a captivating departure from the Deep South setting of his previous fiction, Steve Yarbrough now gives us a richly nuanced portrait of a marriage being reinvented in a small town in the Northeast, in his most surprising and compelling novel yet.When Kristin Stevens loses her administrative job in California’s university system, she and her husband, Cal, relocate to Massachusetts. Kristin takes a position at a smaller, less prestigious college outside Boston and promptly becomes entangled in its delicate, overheated politics. Cal, whose musical talent is nothing more than a consuming avocation, spends his days alone, fixing up their new home. And as they settle into their early fifties, the two seem to exist in separate spheres entirely. At the same time, their younger neighbor Matt Drinnan watches his ex-wife take up with another man in his hometown, with only himself to blame. He and Kristin, both facing an acute sense of isolation, gravitate toward each other, at first in hope of a platonic confidant but then, inevitably, of something more. The Realm of Last Chances provides us with a subtle, moving exploration of relationships, loneliness and our convoluted attempts to reach out to one another.Review“What an exhilarating, intelligent, beautifully complicated novel. I love how richly peopled it is and I love the exact New England landscapes… But I think what made me read this book in a single sitting was the voice and the way in which it allowed me both to know and to not know Kristin, Matt and Cal. That combination makes The Realm of Last Chances wonderfully suspenseful. Every character has a secret sorrow.” —Margot Livesey“Steve Yarbrough stands among the first rank of contemporary novelists, and stands alone with the deep compassion and humanity he brings to his characters and their stories. The Realm of Last Chances is what all novels strive to be—boldly provocative, reflective, witty, and wise, and deeply insightful of the outer and inner workings of people, couples and communities, muddling along through life together. This novel is that rare achievement, a page-turner that also turns pages within the reader.” —Jeffrey Lent“Here's a riddle. What happens when you turn loose a world-class southern writer in an old New England town and tell him to have at it?  Answer: Steve Yarbrough's magnificent new novel is what happens. The Realm of Last Chances reveals how it's not just Faulkner territory where the past isn't past, as Yarbrough explores the way one's family and community can both condemn and redeem us all, wherever we live. This beautifully-written story is the most honest, insightful, and, ultimately, affirmative novel about love under great stress that I've read in years.” —Howard Frank Mosher“Yarbrough has written a deeply intelligent and wildly moving story about the many permutations of love, betrayal and redemption.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) About the AuthorBorn in Indianola, Mississippi, Steve Yarbrough is the author of five previous novels and three collections of stories.  A PEN/Faulkner finalist, he has received the Mississippi Authors Award, the California Book Award, the Richard Wright Award, and another prize from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters.  He teaches at Emerson College and lives with his wife in Stoneham, Massachusetts.

It is 1943, and the war has come home to Loring, Mississippi. As German POWs labor in the cotton fields, the local draft board sends boys into uniform, and families receive flags and condolences. But for Dan Timms, just shy of 18, the war is his ticket out of town and away from the ghosts that haunt him. As he peddles goods from a rolling store for his profiteer uncle, Dan tries to understand his friend L.C., a young man who, on account of his skin, feels like a prisoner himself. But one day, Dan spots Marty Stark who has just returned from Italy, mysteriously reassigned to guard the POWs he was once trained to kill. As Dan soon learns, Marty’s war is far from over and threatens to erupt again. From the Trade Paperback edition.From Publishers WeeklySet in the same small Mississippi town as Yarbrough's critically acclaimed Visible Spirits, this complex WWII-era novel explores questions of morality and social inequity in the rural South when a group of German POWs are quartered at a local camp and sent to work as day laborers on nearby farms. The novel opens with the uncomfortable friendship between young Dan Timms, who drives one of his enterprising Uncle Alvin's "rolling stores" (old school buses boasting all the necessities of country life: sodas, coal-oil lamps, radios), and L.C. Stevens, the black employee who drives the other. While L.C. vainly struggles to make his work partner see the "parallel universe" in which black Americans are trapped, Dan yearns to join the army and escape the fresh memory of his father's recent suicide and his suspicions about his mother's past. But Dan's friend Marty Stark shows him another side of war when he returns damaged and changed from the German theater and is reassigned to help guard the town's German POWs. The story shifts subtly when a Polish prisoner informs Dan of an escape planned by several other prisoners, setting in motion a chain of events that eventually brings Marty's troubled war memories to the surface. Meanwhile, L.C. suffers a beating by an older, powerful white man who, after losing his own son in the war, uses his influence to ensure that the young black man is drafted. The multiple subplots slow the novel's pace, but Yarbrough's warm, measured voice, clean prose and rich character studies make this an unusually tender and accomplished study of the reverberations of war on the home front.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From BooklistOnce again, Yarbrough (Visible Spirits, 2001) turns in a gripping, character-driven novel that tackles important issues of race relations, patriotism, and the effects of war. The story takes place in a rural Mississippi community in 1943. Dan Timms is a few weeks shy of enlisting in the military, and he can hardly wait to shake the small-town dust off his shoes. For him the war is a reason to escape the knowledge of his mother's infidelity and the discovery of his father's suicide. Not even the experiences of his best friend, who has returned from the war with a damaged psyche, can dissuade him. Nor can his war-profiteering uncle, for whom Dan works part-time. Also working for Alvin Timms is L. C., a young African American who has no intention of serving in the military and for whom the racial gap is wider than the Grand Canyon. The novel is far from weak on plot, but Yarbrough's characters are so powerfully three-dimensional that the story's tension flows from many directions. And it never lets up. Frank CasoCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Set against a backdrop of the current political and cultural upheaval in the US and Eastern Europe, The Unmade World is a thoughtful, scope-y literary novel with a dose of suspense that moves from Poland to California to the Hudson Valley and back to Poland. It covers a decade in the lives of an American journalist and a Polish small businessman turned petty criminal and the wrenching aftermath of an accidental, tragic encounter between these two on a snowy night in 2006 on the outskirts of Krakow. The accident costs the lives of the American journalist Richard Brennan's wife and daughter, an event that colors the rest of his life. It also leads to a downward spiral for Bogdan Baranowsk, leaving emotional scars as he suffers the seemingly inevitable loss of his business, his home, and his wife. The Unmade World is a story of ordinary, otherwise decent people from various backgrounds and circumstances who must learn how to live with the personal grief, sense of guilt,...

In a small town in the Mississippi Delta, Luke May teaches local history to students too young to remember the turmoil of the civil rights era. Luke himself was just a child in 1962 when James Meredith's enrollment at Ole Miss provoked a bloody new battle in the old Civil War. But when a long-lost friend suddenly returns to town, bringing with her a reminder of the act of searing violence that ended her childhood, Luke begins to realize that his connection to the past runs deeper than he ever could have imagined. An intricate novel of family secrets, extramarital affairs, and political upheaval, Safe from the Neighbors is a magnificent achievement.From the Trade Paperback edition.