Centerville [Paperback]

Karen Osborn is the author of three previous novels,Patchwork(a New York Times Notable Book of the Year),Between Earth and Sky, andThe River Road. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts with her husband and teaches fiction writing at Mt. Holyoke College and Fairfield University. While growing up in the Midwest, she witnessed a bombing and the resulting conflagration in her small town.

Learn more about Karen Osborn at www.karenosborn.net.

It is 1967 at the end of a long, hot summer. On a Saturday afternoon in Centerville, a sleepy Midwestern town, a disaffected husband enters a busy drugstore where his estranged wife works and sets a bag with a homemade bomb on the floor. Outside the drugstore, a fourteen-year-old girl places her hand on the door, then inexplicably turns away and keeps walking. Moments later, standing safely inside a bowling alley with her best friend, she hears a sound like thunder. With one devastating explosion, the town is changed forever. In the next few days, four lives become entwined, as the townspeople face sudden loss and new, unpredictable realities. Set against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement and the escalating Vietnam War,Centervilleforms an engrossing meditation on the complex questions that arise in the wake of senseless violence.

"A unique novel of smalltown America that begins with an explosion so wonderfully described you won't be able to put the book down. Karen Osborn combines considerable literary gifts with a storyteller's skills to produce the unforgettableCenterville."
Anita Shreve, author ofResistance, The Weight of Water,andRescue

“It’s the summer of 1967; the news is awash with race riots and the escalating war in Vietnam. In the aftermath of a brutal and premeditated act of violence, the residents of a somnolent American town find themselves in a new world full of menacelã"