At the beginning of this high-spirited and inexhaustibly inventive novel of the American West, a seven-year-old boy on an Apache Indian reservation has his head run over by a mail truck. Though his skull is crushed, Edgar miraculously survives the accident after being resuscitated by a possibly deranged hospital intern, Dr. Barry Pinkley. After three months in a coma, Edgar wakes up to find himself in St. Divine's Hospital in Globe, Arizona, surrounded by other survivors of horrific accidents. Alcoholic Art Crozier, pieced together after the car crash that killed his wife and daughters, takes the boy under his wing. When Edgar recovers his health but loses the ability to write with a pen, Art gives him an old Hermes typewriter. He is soon filling up page after page in an attempt to make sense of his increasingly dismal fate. Abandoned by his grandmother and alcoholic mother, Edgar is sent to live at Willie Sherman School, a boarding school cum dumping ground for unwanted Indian children. After several years and many run-ins with the pathologically cruel bully Nelson Norman, Edgar is finally taken into foster care by a Mormon family in Utah. But despite this turn of better fortune, Edgar's one wish remains: to bring the good news of his survival to the mailman who ran him over. His search leads him to a small town in Pennsylvania, where a profoundly ironic tragedy awaits, and where he finally finds a loving home. The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint is an immensely enjoyable story, with an unforgettable hero whose troubles and yearnings are completely captivating. While Edgar suffers many losses, including the loss of most of the illusions that make people's lives bearable, he maintains his innate goodness and his belief in the redeeming power of language. The result is a miracle of storytelling, bursting with heartache and hilarity and inhabited by characters as outsized as the landscape of the American West.