What happens when violence rocks a small town? Karen Osborn’s Centerville, a new novel from West Virginia University Press, explores the aftermath of senseless violence, as a community comes to grips with sudden loss and unpredictable realities.

The novel is set in 1967 at the end of a long, hot summer. On a Saturday afternoon in Centerville, a sleepy Midwestern town, a disaffected husband enters a busy drugstore where his estranged wife works and sets a bag with a homemade bomb on the floor. Outside the drugstore, a 14-year-old girl places her hand on the door then inexplicably turns away and keeps walking.

Moments later, standing safely inside a bowling alley with her best friend, she hears a sound like thunder. With one devastating explosion, the town is changed forever. In the next few days, four lives become entwined, as the townspeople face sudden loss and new, unpredictable realities. Set against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement and the escalating Vietnam War, Centerville forms an engrossing meditation on the complex questions that arise in the wake of senseless violence.

Osborn is the author of three novels: Patchwork (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), Between Earth and Sky, and The River Road. She lives in Amherst, Mass., with her husband and teaches fiction writing at Mt. Holyoke College and Fairfield University. While growing up in the Midwest, she witnessed a bombing and the resulting conflagration in her small town and used this experience to develop the novel Centerville.

Anita Shreve, author of Resistance, The Weight of Water, and Rescue calls CentervilIe “A unique novel of small-town America that begins with an explosion so wonderfully described you won’t be able to put the book down.”

Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of The Deep End of the Ocean, praises Centerville by declaring: “In the hands of a master of craft, like Karen Osborn, devastation is rendered with devastating restraint. You may try to forget Centerville, but you never will.”

To order this title or to learn more about this book or any WVU Press title, visit www.wvupress.com or phone (800) 621-2736.

Centerville by Karen Osborn
October 2012/192pp
PB 978-1-935978-64-0: $16.99
ePub 978-1-935978-65-7: $16.99
PDF 978-1-935978-66-4: $16.99

-WVU-

CONTACT: Abby Freeland, Marketing Manager at West Virginia University Press
304 293 8400×6, abby.freeland@mail.wvu.edu

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