Despite this being a 2002 Pulitzer Prize winner, I didn't consider reading this for myself until it was held up as an example in this writing book. I finally picked it up after a conversation with a What Should I Read Next guest pushed me over the edge. This story about a blue-collar town whose best days are behind it wasn't at all what I expected—especially the ending. I would love to talk this one over with a good book club.

My husband says this is the best thing he read last year. I thought it was fine—maybe even good—but definitely didn't LOVE it. In this short novel, three college friends come back together for the first time in years, reunited at the very place where they spent a life-changing weekend together nearly forty years before. That was the weekend that one of their friends—a friend they were all at least a little bit in love with—disappeared, and they've been thinking about her ever since. A story of male friendship, family tragedy, and how the past is never really past.

From the publisher: "After eight commanding works of fiction, the Pulitzer Prize winner now turns to memoir in a hilarious, moving, and always surprising account of his life, his parents, and the upstate New York town they all struggled variously to escape. A world elsewhere was the dream his mother instilled in Rick, and strived for herself, and their subsequent adventures and tribulations in achieving that goal—beautifully recounted here—were to prove lifelong. Truly beautiful, an immediate classic."