Over the course of one night interlaced with high school flashbacks the four settle old scores and uncover some of the town's nefarious secrets. Once a bastion of steel-mill industry, New Canaan has been corroded by economic downturn and opiates it's pervaded by a sense of disillusionment shared by the four, whose rudderless adult lives pale alongside the blinding lights of their adolescence. In Markley's standout debut novel (following nonfiction works Publish This Book and Tales of Iceland), four former high school classmates return to their Ohio hometown to make amends. Before the evening is through, these narratives converge masterfully to reveal a mystery so dark and shocking it will take your breath away. Set over the course of a single evening, Ohio toggles between the perspectives of these unforgettable characters as they unearth dark secrets, revisit old regrets and uncover-and compound-bitter betrayals.

There’s Bill Ashcraft, a passionate, drug-abusing young activist whose flailing ambitions have taken him from Cambodia to Zuccotti Park to post-BP New Orleans, and now back home with a mysterious package strapped to the undercarriage of his truck Stacey Moore, a doctoral candidate reluctantly confronting her family and the mother of her best friend and first love, whose disappearance spurs the mystery at the heart of the novel Dan Eaton, a shy veteran of three tours in Iraq, home for a dinner date with the high school sweetheart he’s tried desperately to forget and the beautiful, fragile Tina Ross, whose rendezvous with the washed-up captain of the football team triggers the novel’s shocking climax. One sweltering night in 2013, four former high school classmates converge on their hometown in northeastern Ohio. “A book that has stayed with me ever since I put it down.” -Seth Meyers, host of Late Night with Seth Meyers

“ descendent of the Dickensian ‘social novel’ by way of Jonathan Franzen: epic fiction that lays bare contemporary culture clashes, showing us who we are and how we got here.” - O, The Oprah Magazine “A wild, angry, and devastating masterpiece of a book.” -NPR earnestly ambitious debut.” - The New York Times Book Review

Book ohio by stephen markley