Friendswood: A Novel
by René Steinke
Buy on AmazonSteinke's sense of this small Texas town, with its explosive and interconnected lives and deaths, is absolutely masterful. Elizabeth Gilbert A big, moving novel of one tight-knit Texas community and the events that alter its residents lives forever. Friendswood, Texas, is a small Gulf Coast town of church suppers, oil rigs on the horizon, hurricane weather, and high school football games. When tragedy rears its head with an industrial leak that kills and sickens residents, it pulls on the common thread that runs through the community, intensifying everything.…
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"Texas is a huge, complicated state, and it’s sometimes a difficult one for authors to get right. Not so for René Steinke, whose Friendswood does a near-perfect job capturing the feel not just of the titular city but of southeast Texas as a whole. Steinke’s chronicle of the residents of a town dealing with — and denying — a recent environmental disaster is disturbing and thought-provoking, and one of the most interesting novels to be set in the Lone Star State in quite a while."
NPR Books We Love — 2014 · apps.npr.org