Kathryn Larrabee
An Everyday Savior

"Understated integrity and quiet dignity are the hallmarks of Kathryn Larrabee's debut novel … Larrabee's sure hand with her material and her feel for the rituals of home life make this a richly textured and rewarding novel." —Publishers Weekly

"Kathryn Larrabee writes with such force and feeling and humor about her beautifully realized characters that you end up feeling that they must be living somewhere nearby, the next street or the next town, and if you only knew where, you would go and help. An Everyday Savior is a novel of considerable suspense and cumulative power. A splendid debut." —Margot Livesey

"An Everyday Savior is not an everyday novel: it has an uncommon feeling for the divided and sometimes anguished emotional allegiances of men toward the women they love and want to help, even when that help leads to unforeseen trouble. This is a serious and perceptive book about love, eros, and responsibility, and it marks Kathryn Larrabee as an author to watch." — Charles Baxter

It's winter in upstate New York, and for Harley Cookson — a good-natured, blue-collar guy with a gift for taking people under his wing — life has become more complicated than he ever imagined it could be. He has a new home, a new wife (recently emigrated from Russia), and an aging mother who requires almost constant care. In an effort to keep her out of a nursing home, Harley decides to take his mother into his home. He soon realizes it's more than he bargained for. What's worse, Harley finds himself becoming susceptible to nostalgia.… He longs for the past — more specifically the women in his past — whom he can neither recapture nor totally forget. Then he runs into his old high school girlfriend, Lynette, and a renewed infatuation with her causes his already unstable domestic life to take a turn for the worse. Harley becomes certain that Lynette's husband is beating her, and he decides he must protect her, too. But just as he's planning his next move, Lynette's husband is killed in what seems to be a freak accident. Harley is relieved but also concerned about Lynette's possible involvement in the death, and while facing down disaster in his own marriage, he is forced to confront the possibility that he's powerless to save her.

An Everyday Savior is a poignant and suspenseful debut novel that — like Richard Russo's Mohawk and Pat Conroy's early work — is both astonishingly mature and elegantly textured. The result is a dazzling tale of small-town obsession that strives to make sense of our innermost longings while acknowledging their basic impracticality.

Kathryn Larrabee lives in upstate New York and holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan, where she won the distinguished Hopwood Award.

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