Grand Avenue — Greg Sarris

Set in a northern California landscape of tumbledown shacks and recycled barracks, Grand Avenue is anything but grand. It is the turbulent, makeshift home for a community of poor and disenfranchised Pomo Indians -- along with Mexicans, blacks, and some Portuguese -- struggling to make their way in a world that has done its best to forget them. In his unforgettable first novel, Greg Sarris portrays yearning teenagers, jilted lovers, struggling parents, and elderly healers. The result is a heartbreakingly passionate and honest book, woven from ten interconnected stories, that reverberates with Native American myth and twentieth-century humor and irony.