The story of a father’s return to his childhood home, the site of unspeakable tragedy, and of the complex and often warring obligations—not least forgiveness—we have to our family, our friends, and our past.

Naomi and Scanlon Pratt are at the threshold of a new life. Transplants from back East to small-town Oregon, he’ll be a professor at the university-teaching mass movements and domestic radicalism-and she, a professional “nose” who lost her sense of smell, is pregnant with their first child.

Scribner turns his eye to the gritty urban landscape of America’s dying industrial cities, to questions about faith and ethics, and tells a twisting tale that will seduce you into suspending your notions about reality until the very last chapter.

A chilling psychological study of an ordinary husband and wife consumed by their pursuit of the American Dream, The GoodLife is based on the true story of the kidnapping of an Exxon executive in suburban New Jersey by an unlikely pair of criminals: a middle-aged, middle-class husband and wife, deeply in debt.