Western Terminus - by Michael Keefe (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Heartbroken Chloe is obsessed with a lion escaped from the Portland Zoo. A man revisits an old flame, a nemesis, and the granite quarry where he played dangerous games in his youth. A boy witnesses the disintegration of his parents' marriage at a motel in the California desert. Zane takes his girlfriend's son to a drug house in the Northwest woodlands. Kate follows a poet into remote 1980s Tijuana in pursuit of a rumored tunnel beneath the international border. And Doug returns to the Southern California farm where he was raised and must now grapple with the ghosts of the past. In tales tinged with magical realism, Michael Keefe's characters find themselves caught in the limbo between self-discovery and self-destruction.

Review Quotes

"The men of Keefe's stories don't always find what they are searching for, but they take the reader along for a glorious ride."

-Electric Literature

"These stories explore moments of transition and revelation with profound wisdom, empathy, and precision."

-Kimberly King Parsons, winner of the Oregon Book Award

"Stories of reckoning and transformation, stories that shudder, shift, and shine."

-Joe Wilkins, author of The Entire Sky

winner of the Oregon Book Award

"Michael Keefe has a prickly love for the outskirts, the missed love, and stubborn loyalty to people even when they might not deserve us."

-Susan Straight, National Book Award finalist

"Mesmerizing and tightly woven, these beautiful stories inspire as much as they enlighten."

-Erika Krouse, author of Save Me, Stranger

"For the characters in Western Terminus, living in the present offers a kind of peace-not borne from naïveté, but hard-won. "

-Rachel King, author of Bratwurst Haven: Stories

winner of the Colorado Book Award