Stewart O'Nan never fails to impress me. He tackles different themes, different eras, different everything in each book. This one, slim and incisive, is a masterpiece of understatement. The tale of Jacob Hansen's life and losses soon after the Civil War, when the town of Friendship is stricken by both a diphtheria epidemic and a raging forest fire, is exquisitely simple but remarkably powerful. I haven't stopped thinking about this book since I finished reading it. I marvel at how much O'Nan manages to convey without ever being explicit. Love, tragic loss, and survival against all odds are the interwoven strands of the theme. Life lessons compressed into one short book. This is a very special novel, written by a wonderfully gifted writer.