Robert Bausch Books In Order

The Lives of Riley Chance

Sometimes harrowing, sometimes funny, often luminously beautiful, and always profoundly imaginative and moving, The Lives of Riley Chance is the dazzlingly original new work by the author whose first novel, On the Way Home, established him as an important and powerful new voice in American fiction.

Almighty Me

Almighty Me is the story of an ordinary man an automobile salesman who is given Almighty God’s great powers for one full year, no strings attached . This offer throws his life into a tailspin as he tries to manipulate the perfect life with his wife, his family, and with his colleagues at work. It is only when he discovers the limitations of God s power, plus his own micro image of the world s problems, that all hell breaks loose.

A wonderful novel. Intelligent, fanciful, world weary but joyous, and very, very funny. Fay Weldon

A Hole in the Earth

A novel of families, what tears them apart and what can bring them back together, A Hole in the Earth is an extraordinarily, sometimes excruciatingly accurate portrait of a man charting the foreign territory of his feelings. Henry Porter’s summer begins when his daughter Nicole whom he hasn’t seen in five years shows up on his doorstep. Days later his girlfriend, Elizabeth, announces that she is pregnant. That Henry is speechless at these two events throws into sharp relief his emotional landscape, and this novel charts that landscape’s exact contours. Anyone who has ever wondered what a man is saying when he isn’t talking will find at least a large part of the answer here. Robert Bausch deciphers with perfect economy and unstinting honesty the code embodied in this man’s and a great many men’s words and actions, and discovers there the world of family legacies, love, and abuse. A Hole in the Earth brilliantly draws the webs that attract us to and repel us from our families, as well as the enduring strength that they can provide.

The Gypsy Man

The motto of Crawford, Virginia, might well be Beware what you fear, because it may come true. Penny Bone is terrified of the town’s local legend of a child stealing phantom. Henry Gault, her six year old daughter’s teacher, scoffs at the tale, trusting in reason and foresight to safeguard what is most precious to him. Penny’s husband, John, is in prison for an accidental murder that happened because he was trying to be too careful. And in prison he will, almost accidentally, become a hero, which makes him prey to what he fears most hope. An eerie succession of events will take these people into the bull’s eye of risk that everyday life presents. While The Gypsy Man may be just one of Crawford’s myths, John and Penny Bone are as real as the rising sun, and their strength, separately and together, reminds us why life is worth living. The Gypsy Man, and its durable and enduring characters, illuminates how an elusive truth lives behind every legend.

Out of Season

Four characters burdened by the past intersect at a fading resort town when County Sheriff David Caldwell is called in to restore the order destroyed by the town bully, Cecil Edwards-a giant of a man who operates the Ferris wheel. Caldwell must also face the sorrow that has been his daily companion when he reunites with his son, Todd, who has been in prison for the accidental death of his brother. During this reconciliation, Todd meets a mysterious young woman, Lindsey, who is searching for her long-lost brother and finds a love she never knew possible.

With the intensity of a Shakespearean tragedy, these four people are drawn into the gravitational pull of family. Robert Bausch draws on the heartbreaking energy of families in distress like no other writer, and Out of Season resonates with the purity of redemption in the face of irretrievable losses.