Anne Marie is living a precarious life of shift-work and shared apartments. Her husband Cal left her on their first anniversary and two years later, she can’t move on. Then he suddenly shows up on her doorstep, clearly in some kind of trouble. Later that night a gun goes off in an alley and the couple set off on an ill-at-ease odyssey across a shimmering American landscape and through the darker seams of the country, towards a city that may or may not represent salvation. A story of being lost and found, of love, in all its forms, and of how the pursuit of love is, in its turn, a kind of redemption.

Thea Lenarduzzi is a commissioning editor at The TLS.