Lucky Man, Lucky Woman — Jack Driscoll

Winner of Pushcart's Seventeenth Annual Editors' Book Award, this first novel about a marriage in crisis has evoked extraordinary praise from readers Pam Houston and Rick Bass. In presenting Lucky Man, Lucky Woman with the Editors' Book Award, publisher Bill Henderson's citation included the following remarks: "I was literally stunned by this first novel-amazed that one writer could evoke such sweetness and compassion about a middle-aged marriage and in such wonderful detail." The New York Times praised Jack Driscoll's short story collection, Wanting Only to Be Heard, for its extraordinary depiction of "the psychic terrors that dwell on the fringes of human endeavor." In Lucky Man, Lucky Woman the author investigates those terrors much closer to home. Crowding forty, Perry Lafond knows he's had a decent life with his wife, Marcia, but he's just not sure if he wants to live that life anymore. His wife, battling infertility, is obsessed on the idea of having a baby. And Perry wants a child too, maybe. Suddenly, he can't keep his mind off other women, including the young, sad, and beleaguered wife of the parolee who Perry monitors in his job as a probation officer. Always unflinchingly honest, Lucky Man, Lucky Woman tracks a man's headlong-and just possibly redemptive-leap into chaos.