In this debut collection, tangled bonds of love and family collide with a natural world both fragile and ferocious. Upended by grief, a widowed veterinarian seeks solace by fostering a litter of orphaned opossums. A young lawyer embarks on an affair, only to fall into a deeper, stranger entrancement with her lover's nine-year-old daughter during a weekend on the Lake Huron coast. In the depths of a Wisconsin winter, a recovering alcoholic risks everything to plot a careening course toward atonement. And in the title story, two teenagers steal a car, discover a loaded rifle in the backseat, and set off consequences both devastating and tender for a series of strangers they'll never meet.

Set across the Midwest and rural Appalachia, the stories in Joyriders offer a resonant vision of rural and small-town life: lonely, half-haunted landscapes are pierced with moments of light, and even the most taciturn faces conceal inner worlds both rich and strange. Comfort and heartache abound-entangled, inseparable. "What was Kevin suggesting," wonders Valerie, after struggling for years to steer her innocent, angry, mysteriously afflicted son through the world, "that she loved him less because of his troubles? Oh, preposterous. More, she wanted to tell him, more." Characters' paths repeatedly bend in unforeseen directions, and the shape of each story surprises-illuminating, in this way, the surprising contours of entire lives.