Ember Days: A Novel

On the edge of the cultural earthquake that would be the 1960s, the people who live in the coastal village of Mendocino in 1959 can feel it coming. Beats and jazz, poetry and art are spilling out of San Francisco onto the the northern coasts of California. World War II is laid to rest, but people feel restless. When a village son, now a priest, comes back home to bury his mother, he finds his younger brother gone, and a town full of secrets-some of them his own. Ember Days, named for the ancient prayers that marked the change from one season to the next, reveals the heart's deep longings and fears in the face of truth and change, life and death.