AND SONS

Long before she's Marley Joseph, beloved de facto matriarch of Joseph and Sons Roofing Company, it's 1990 and Marley West is blazing into the river valley town of Mercury, Pennsylvania a gorgeous teenager and perpetual loner, seeking a place at someone's table. The first thing she sees is “three men standing atop an empty building, two-hundred feet in the air .a virile vista against the trees.” Their silhouettes blot out the sun.

In Amy Jo Burns's clarion-hearted and capacious new novel AND SONS, that vista of men, of Josephs, of unruly brothers (Waylon, Baylor and Shay), eats Marley up and becomes her whole world before she can blink. She's soon young wife to one, The One Who Got Away to another, and, when their own mom's spark fades with no help from her husband, adopted mother to all. Like quicksilver, nine years pass. The elder Joseph matriarch, Elise, is dead, no Joseph brother is talking to the other, the roofing company their wayward father built is buckling, Waylon and Marley are on the outs despite being married and she, not yet thirty, is presiding over a business, and family, she never exactly chose in the first place—which no man seems to think she can run.

When an emergency roofing job turns up a mystery body in their local church's attic, old wounds resurface and suddenly the Joseph family's future hangs in the balance. Fair or not, it's up to Marley to decide what comes next—whether she should give up and leave these maddening men fixed in time, atop impossible repair jobs scanning the heavens for the unreachable kind of freedom their father promised, or to hope for a future where they climb down from their remove and see her, and one another, clearly for the first time. Where they choose to love on solid ground.

Amy Jo Burns is the author of the memoir Cinderland (Beacon Press, 2014) and the novel Shiner (Riverhead, 2020), which was a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick, NPR Best Book of the year, and “told in language as incandescent as smoldering coal,” according to The New York Times. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, Tin House, Elle, Good Housekeeping, Ploughshares, Electric Literature, Literary Hub, and the anthology Not That Bad.