Shepard, J: World to Come

Bursting with wicked humor and driven by an incomparable understanding of what it means to be human, The World to Come is the inimitable work of " the most ambitious story writer in America" (The Daily Beast). Shepard traverses both borders and centuries, seamlessly inhabiting a multitude of disparate men and women, and giving voice to visionaries, pioneers, and secret misfits-from nineteenth-century explorers departing on one of the Arctic's most nightmarish expeditions to twentieth-century American military wives maintaining hope at home. Shepard's characters confront everything from the emotional pitfalls of everyday life to colossal catastrophes, battling natural forces, the hazards of new technology, and their own implacable shortcomings. "[Shepard] has a knack for compressing a novel's worth of life into 30 or 40 pages." -The Boston Globe