This book begins with "We're in Trouble," a suite of three stories that introduces its common theme: love darkening and persevering as it is tried by the cold fact of death. And in the vivid stories that follow, as Coake's unforgettable characters experience love staring at the face of death, it elicits either the best or the worst in them. From a wife waiting for news of her husband's latest death-defying climb to a sheriff thrown into turmoil after his close friend enacts a horrifying murder-suicide, Coake makes us feel the truth of his imperiled characters' lives and transforms it into cathartic art. With the complexity, depth, and narrative drive of a novel, this extraordinary debut collection is at once suspenseful, empathic, and almost unbearably moving.
"Sometimes when you're reading these stories, you forget to breathe. . . Beautifully written . . . They're never dull and they all contain striking and dramatic narrative ideas."
Nick Hornby, The Believer
"Coake has . . . done something both alarming and amazing: He has taken his proximity to mortality's horrors, mined them for their truest nature, married them to a sure hand for storytelling and presented us all with a debut book of stories, We're in Trouble, that is both beautiful in its elegance and merciless in its intensity."
