Nine novels that examine the wounds of rural America

Susan Bernhard is a Massachusetts Cultural Council fellowship recipient and a graduate of the GrubStreet Novel Incubator program. She was born and raised in the Bitterroot Valley of western Montana, is a graduate of the University of Maryland, and lives with her husband and two children near Boston.

Winter Loon is her debut novel.

At Lithub she took "a look at contemporary fiction that taps into Americana mythology and storytelling, that is unafraid to turn the body over and examine the underbelly for wounds and scars," and tagged nine novels. One title on the list:

Susan Henderson, The Flicker of Old Dreams

Henderson explores the idea of the American Dream, how we pursue it, how we lose it, in this novel set in small town Montana. When a high school hero dies in a tragic farm accident, his brother disappears, only to return years later to a town dying and still dealing with the death of this boy. The narrator—a mortician daughter of a mortician, whose life has been about death from the moment of birth—lovingly breathes hope into this book of small gestures, of anguish and loneliness, about dying and grief, and the isolation of rural America.

Read about another title on the list.

The Page 69 Test: The Flicker of Old Dreams.

My Book, The Movie: The Flicker of Old Dreams.

--Marshal Zeringue