San Antonio College Library

This novel revolves around the troubles of an elderly Midwestern couple and their three adult children, tracing their lives from the mid-twentieth century to "one last Christmas" together near the turn of the millennium. All five members of the Lambert family get their due, as everybody's lives swirl out of control. The author intends to deliver a tragicomic portrait of a flawed nation with the equally flawed notion of perfectibility at its heart

Twenty-four-year-old Edward Warren, has been living in Thailand for five years, a prodigal son who left his family after an irreparable fight with his father, Luke. But he gets a frantic phone call: his dad lies comatose, gravely injured in the same accident that has also injured his younger sister Cara. With her father's chances for recovery dwindling, Cara wants to wait for a miracle. But Edward wants to terminate life support and donate his father's...

After writing a novel that lampooned nearly everyone in his hometown, Joe Goffman is forced to return to that same town to care for his father and discovers that people have not forgotten the indignities he heaped upon them.

The novel deals with the significance of two connected events that happened on the same day, long before the opening of the novel. The first was the excavation of an ancient and valuable archaeological idol, a phallic figure unearthed from the tomb of an Anglo-Saxon bishop Eorpwald, known as the "Melpham excavation". Gerald has long been haunted by a drunken revelation by his friend Gilbert, who was involved with this excavation, that the whole thing...