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Buckeye

by Patrick Ryan

2025 464 pages
Fiction Book Club Audiobook Literary Fiction Adult Historical Fiction Historical Adult Fiction Family War

About this book

In Bonhomie, Ohio, a stolen moment of passion, sparked in the exuberant aftermath of the Allied victory in Europe, binds Cal Jenkins, a man wounded not in war but by his inability to serve in it, to Margaret Salt, a woman trying to obscure her past. Cal’s wife, Becky, has a spiritual gift: She is a seer who can conjure the dead, helping families connect with those they’ve lost. Margaret’s husband, Felix, is serving on a Navy cargo ship, out of harm’s way—until a telegram suggests that the unthinkable might have happened.<br /><br />Later, as the country reconstructs in the postwar boom, a secret grows in Bonhomie—but nothing stays buried forever in a small town. Against the backdrop of some of the most transformative decades in modern America, the consequences of that long-ago encounter ripple through the next generation of both families, compelling them to reexamine who they thought they were and what the future might hold.<br /><br />Sweeping yet intimate, rich with piercing observation and the warmth that comes from profound understanding of the human spirit, <i>Buckeye</i> captures the universal longing for love and for goodness.