Bottomland: A Novel

Michelle Hoover has published fiction in Confrontation, the Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, Best New American Voices, and others. She has been a Bread Loaf Writer's Conference scholar, the Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell University, a MacDowell fellow, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and the 2005 winner of the PEN/New England Discovery Award for Fiction. She was born in Ames, Iowa, the granddaughter of four longtime farming families.

''Comparisons to Dreiser and Cather are inevitable when you read Michelle Hoover's classic heartland novels because Hoover knows rural life, its unforgiving reality, and its people so well; in Bottomland, she makes this landscape her own with new vivid lyricism. This post-WWI novel about an ostracized German-American family searching Iowa and Chicago for their missing teenage girls is poignant, powerful, and hypnotically readable.'' --Jenna Blum, New York Times bestselling author

''...From small town to the grit of the city, family farm to union factories, the Midwest of Michelle Hoover's Bottomland is alive with secrets, hard choices, and the acute costs of independence.'' --Daphne Kalotay, author of Russian Winter and Sight Reading

''Bottomland is a work of unusual intelligence -- enthralling and precise. Michelle Hoover has woven an incandescent story of a family torn apart by war and loss, and she has done so with such breathtaking insight, you can almost feel these lives rise off the page.'' --Dawn Tripp, author of Game of Secrets

''Hoover skillfully interweaves many of the Hess family members' narratives. Her descriptions of the bleak rural landscape is chilling. Fans of Jim Harrison's Legends of the Fall will enjoy the plot; Willa Cather enthusiasts will relish the setting; and Theodore Dreiser readers will savor the gritty characterizations.'' --Library Journal (starred review)

''Through the faceted first-person accounts of four siblings and their father, Hoover delivers a lyrical, at times mysterious, and dreamy tale of family ties...Hoover plays a sly hand of revelation, leaving the truth about how and why the girls escaped to emerge late and plan gently. Deftly imagined and written, Hoover's second novel offers an intriguing, modern take on a classic American landscape.'' --Kirkus Reviews

''Hoover vividly describes the harsh realities of life on a farm, on the battlefield, and in a Chicago sweatshop through the eyes of masterfully drawn characters. A novel as poignant as it is clear-eyed.'' --Booklist

''An ensemble cast narrates this haunting story about a German-American family at the end of WWI. When the two youngest daughters disappear from the locked bedroom of the family's Iowa farmhouse in the dead of winter, the family's desperate search is thwarted by hostile townspeople and their own dysfunctional family dynamics. This account of desperation and resilience is told in segments by the autocratic father and four of his children, and each portion is performed by a different narrator. Each character has a distinct perspective as the bleak story unfolds. While all five voices are well cast, Robertson Dean provides the finest performance as the patriarch, thanks to his gruff tone and starkly elegant diction.'' --AudioFile