Old Border Road — Susan Froderberg

Katherine is seventeen, living alone in a trailer in southern Arizona. Her mother is feckless, and her father is up north, busy with his new family. When Son, the scion of a local rancher, invites her to marry him and live in his parents' big adobe house, it seems like deliverance. Katherine thinks she loves him until his true taciturn and carousing nature shows itself. At church, Katherine hears the new minister speak in comforting tones of God's love. When Son steals Katherine's most precious possession to give to his lover, she takes refuge with the Padre.

This liaison will be Katherine's first attempt to find her own way in a beautifully desolate landscape that is in the throes of a dangerous, summer-long draught. As she continues life with a husband whose young heart near withered beneath the breastbone, she will learn to rely only on herself. Susan Froderberg's incantatory language--and her deep knowledge of both the complexities of a small, deeply rooted place and the human heart--make Old Border Road soar.