Books in the Flyover Fiction series

In the Nebraska Sandhills, nothing is more sacred than the bond of family and land - and nothing is more capable of causing deep wounds. This novel reveals the inner worlds of characters isolated by geography and habit. It bears witness to the fortitude and hard-won wisdom of people whose lives have been forged by devotion to the land.

The Leave-Takers is a twenty-first-century American love story and a tale of internal migration to the Great Plains.

Kate Riley is not the sort of heroine we meet in most American novels. Self-centered, shape-shifting, driven from one man to another and one city to the next, she is all too real but not at all the loyal and steady homebody of idealized womanhood. Kate's story is one of desperation and remarkable invention, a strangely American tale, narrated by one of our most original writers.

When Richie Thorpe and his ragtag religious band of ex-thieves arrive in the High Plains town of Suborney, Colorado, Tommy Sandor is captivated by the group. It's the summer of 1980 in the dusty, junkyard town, and the seventeen-year-old is wrestling with the forces shaping America and himself.

Sharp-witted and tenderhearted, these are stories in which readers will find people they know but never really knew until now.

Music, whether a Debussy etude or Gram Parson's "Hickory Wind", has been a constant in Ruby Gervais's life. After Ruby helps fuel a paranoid fervor that spreads like wildfire throughout her rural Montana community, her home life deteriorates. Throughout, Ruby Dreams of Janis Joplin is underscored by the music that forms inextricable bonds between fascinating characters.

Explores the relationship between fathers and sons, the dead and the living, the natural and the unnatural. This work reveals the ordinary and the extraordinary genius of a place, a time, a solitary soul embedded in the minutiae of the everyday.

The small plains town of Ingleside, Nebraska, is populated by down-on-their-luck ranchers and new money, ghosts and seers, drugs and greed, the haves and the have-nots. In this novel, lives ripple through each other to surprising effect, though the connections fluctuate between divisive gulfs and the most intimate closeness.

Doesn't shy away from the racism that dwells within the unexamined hearts of so many Americans.

Thematically linked by the lives of women, especially Latinas, and their experiences of poverty and violence in a white-dominated, wealth-obsessed culture, How Winter Began is a delicately wrought collection of stories. The question at the heart of this riveting book is how or whether to trust one another after the rupture of betrayal.

In writing both rich and evocative, Pamela Carter Joern conjures the small plains town of Reach, Nebraska, where residents are stuck tight in the tension between loneliness and the risks of relationships. With insight, wry humour, and deep compassion, Joern renders a cast of recurring characters engaged in battles public and private, epic and mundane.

Although the characters in these stories may be the usual suspects, making the usual mistakes, their stories are anything but the usual fare. Populated by pretenders, ex-cons, and wannabes who bend the rules, break the law, and risk everything to salvage their own hearts, the twelve stories in The Usual Mistakes conduct readers into a world where betrayal is just a beginning.

A prismatic look at the impact of loss on individual lives, Water and Abandon tells the moving and paradoxical story of those brought together by the very thing that tears them apart. As deeply felt as it is finely crafted, the novel confirms Robert Vivian's place among the most interesting fiction writers of our day.

A collection of short stories which feature pretenders, ex-cons, and wannabes who bend the rules, break the law, and risk everything to salvage their own hearts.

A funny yet poignant, time-shifting story of the plains that transcends its interstate spine and exposes us to a whole new level of Svoboda's fiery prose

Acts of loyalty and failures, long-suppressed resentments and a tragic secret are brought to light, expressing a larger, complex truth

Turning loose a Midwestern species of magical realism on a small, God-haunted town in Kansas, Kellie Wells charms strangeness and wonder from what might be mistaken for "ordinary" life

The departed men in her life still have plenty to say to Corey. Her father, a legendary rodeo cowboy who punctuated his lifelong pronouncements with a bullet to his head, may be the loudest. But in this story of Montana - a story in which the old West meets the new and tradition has its way with just about everyone - it is Corey's voice we listen to.

Young Harriet's father sells her as a slave to settle his gambling debt with an eccentric Indian - and her story is just beginning. Part Huck Finn, part True Grit, Harriet's story of her encounter with the dark and brutal history of the American West is a true original.

Lem Purchase is in California when a call comes in the dead of night: his younger, disturbed brother in Nebraska announces his plans to carry out an act of terrorism targeting the state capitol building in Lincoln. This isn't the first time Lem has had to make a frantic check on Jackson. Nor is it the first time that author Robert Vivian has taken us to the haunted world of the Great Plains.

There is nothing particularly noteworthy about an Easter turkey. But when the turkey is stark white and appears on Easter Sunday on the doorstep of a Lakota medicine woman and her teenage granddaughter, it is clearly out of the ordinary. Taking turns, Stella and her grandmother, Hazel Latour, tell the story of what follows as the mysterious turkey stirs up discord on the reservation.

The story of the residents of a small western plains town and the turmoil that results from the colliding interests of its "native" inhabitants and newcomers

"Robert Vivian's prose is lyrical and harrowing - harrowing in the Biblical sense," Sven Birkerts said of The Mover of Bones, the first book in Vivian's Tall Grass Trilogy. That same lyrical power carries this new volume to a place of hard-won hope and redemption at once both spiritual and earthly.

In a story of lust and longing, love and loneliness, disappointment and desire stretching from the East Coast to the West, two pioneering women navigate through secrets, lies, decisions, and compromises shared over pool tables, postcards, and shots of whiskey.

Tells the stories of three generations of a western Nebraska family.

In one hand, Jesse Breedlove holds a bottle of Cuervo Gold - or what's left of it - in the other, the shovel with which he has just unearthed the bones of a small girl buried in the cellar of a Catholic church in Omaha, Nebraska. So begins Breedlove's odyssey across the literal and mythical landscapes of America.