William Cobb's first novel in nine years is a brilliant, quirky, highly readable story as compelling as it is original. Its main characters journey on parallel quests: Lester Ray, a fourteen-year-old boy who was deserted by his mother when he was a baby and has now escaped his abusive alcoholic father, and Minnie, a woman who was abandoned by her Gypsy family of migrant fruit pickers when she was eleven. The novel interweaves their searches for families they never really knew. It ranges...
In this lithely told and atmospheric story, a fishing village on the Gulf Coast loses its bearings as its shrimping industry begins to fail. The town of Goodnight by the Sea lies on a peninsula between two bays, Red Moon and Humosa, and for years its people, many of them immigrants drawn to this ragged edge of America, have struggled to get by. When Gabriel Perez, a local shrimper, gets laid off, he also manages to lose his girlfriend, Una Vu, a beautiful Vietnamese-Hispanic waitress who is...