This vivid story opens with every couple’s nightmare --- the disappearance of their comfortable known world. RUIN explores the unpredictable progression of character and chance for Francy and Frank Campbell, newly destitute in their early 30s, along with their lovers and foes. And a murder investigator.

This vivid story opens with every couple’s nightmare --- the disappearance of their comfortable known world. RUIN explores the unpredictable progression of character and chance for Francy and Frank Campbell, newly destitute in their early 30s, along with their lovers and foes. And a murder investigator.

This vivid story opens with every couple’s nightmare --- the disappearance of their comfortable known world. RUIN’s adventure explores the unpredictable progression of character and chance for Francy and Frank Campbell, newly destitute in their early 30s, along with their lovers and foes. And a murder investigator.

Frank is another dreamer whose life is suddenly burned to the ground. More a disillusioned literature Ph.D. than an experienced financier, he had naively agreed to join his wife’s inheritance with his own personal guarantee of a college friend’s private equity partnership debt.

­The business implosion and subsequent bankruptcy took all their assets. Francy, an orphaned European heiress, now finds herself homeless, still married to pleasant, witty Frank --- who had failed to protect them from disaster.

­The couple flees Manhattan to live at a desolate non-working Hudson Valley farm. Frank starts an artisanal brewery with a charismatic new eccentric friend. And, central to the heart of the story, he takes up fly fishing. A local doctor, perceiving Frank’s depression, prescribes that he gain some confidence through self-taught fishing.

Frank’s perceptions on the water are fresh and acute, sometimes colored by his memory of the words of famous writers, now painfully ironic in his life’s new context. ­ The novel weaves together fly fishing and life experiences that ultimately turn shockingly deadly.

And throughout, there is Francy’s story. Now in exile, she re-approaches painting with new and darkly complex emotional energy. Painting in reclusive concentration, she cuts Frank off, tacitly becoming her own woman. Her work’s enigmatic intensity attracts a wealthy neighbor who offers Francy a show in his Manhattan gallery and that attracts a great deal of trouble indeed.

A breathtaking new novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of ANXIOUS PEOPLE and A MAN CALLED OVE, THE WINNERS returns to the close-knit, resilient community of Beartown for a story about first loves, second chances and last goodbyes.

A breathtaking new novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of ANXIOUS PEOPLE and A MAN CALLED OVE, THE WINNERS returns to the close-knit, resilient community of Beartown for a story about first loves, second chances and last goodbyes.

A breathtaking new novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of ANXIOUS PEOPLE and A MAN CALLED OVE, THE WINNERS returns to the close-knit, resilient community of Beartown for a story about first loves, second chances and last goodbyes.

Over the course of two weeks, everything in Beartown will change.

Maya Andersson and Benji Ovich, two young people who left in search of a life far from the forest town, come home and joyfully reunite with their closest childhood friends. There is a new sense of optimism and purpose in the town, embodied in the impressive new ice rink that has been built down by the lake.

Two years have passed since the events that no one wants to think about. Everyone has tried to move on, but there’s something about this place that prevents it. The destruction caused by a ferocious late-summer storm reignites the old rivalry between Beartown and the neighboring town of Hed, a rivalry that has always been fought through their ice hockey teams.

Maya’s parents, Peter and Kira, are caught up in an investigation of the hockey club’s murky finances, and Amat --- once the star of the Beartown team --- has lost his way after an injury and a failed attempt to get drafted into the NHL. Simmering tensions between the two towns turn into acts of intimidation and then violence. All the while, a 14-year-old boy grows increasingly alienated from this hockey-obsessed community and is determined to take revenge on the people he holds responsible for his beloved sister’s death. He has a pistol and a plan that will leave Beartown with a loss that is almost more that it can stand.

As it beautifully captures all the complexities of daily life and explores questions of friendship, loyalty, loss and identity, this emotion-packed novel asks us to reconsider what it means to win, what it means to lose, and what it means to forgive.