On one fateful summer night in 2013, four former classmates converge on the rust belt town where they grew up, each of them with a mission, all of them haunted by regrets, secrets, lost loves. This is the world the characters in Stephen Markley’s brilliant debut novel, Ohio, inherit.

In the country’s forgotten pockets, where industry long ago fled, where foreclosures, Walmarts, and opiates riddle the land, death rates for rural whites have skyrocketed, fueled by suicide, addiction and a rampant sense of marginalization and disillusionment. Since the turn of the century, a generation has come of age knowing only war, recession, political gridlock, racial hostility, and a simmering fear of environmental calamity. The debut of a major talent a lyrical and emotional novel set in an archetypal small town in northeastern Ohio - a region ravaged by the Great Recession, an opioid crisis, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - depicting one feverish, fateful summer night in 2013 when four former classmates converge on their hometown, each with a mission, all haunted by the ghosts of their shared histories.

A gripping debut novel about a town in decay, and the inhabitants swept up in the crises of modern America

Ohio stephen markley review