Frederick Busch Books In Order

Novels

  1. I Wanted a Year Without Fall (1971)
  2. Breathing Trouble (1973)
  3. Manual Labor (1974)
  4. The Mutual Friend (1978)
  5. Rounds (1979)
  6. Take This Man (1981)
  7. Invisible Mending (1984)
  8. Sometimes I Live in the Country (1986)
  9. Closing Arguments (1988)
  10. War Babies (1989)
  11. Harry and Catherine (1990)
  12. Long Way from Home (1993)
  13. Girls (1997)
  14. The Night Inspector (1999)
  15. A Memory of War (2003)
  16. North (2005)

Collections

  1. Hardwater (1979)
  2. Too Late American Boyhood Blues (1984)
  3. Absent Friends (1989)
  4. The Children in the Woods (1994)
  5. Don’t Tell Anyone (2000)
  6. Rescue Missions (2006)
  7. The Selected Stories of Frederick Busch (2013)

Anthologies edited

  1. The Stories of Frederick Busch (2013)

Non fiction

  1. A Dangerous Profession (1998)
  2. Letters to a Fiction Writer (1999)

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Anthologies edited Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Frederick Busch Books Overview

Invisible Mending

Bernie Rhodenbarr is a personable chap, a good neighbor, a passable poker player. His chosen profession, however, might not sit well with some. Bernie is a burglar, a good one, effortlessly lifting valuables from the not so well protected abodes of well to do New Yorkers like a modern day Robin Hood. The poor, as Bernie would be the first to tell you, alas, have nothing worth stealing. He’s not perfect, however; he occasionally makes mistakes. Like accepting a paid assignment from a total stranger to retrieve a particular item from a rich man’s apartment. Like still being there when the cops arrive. Like having a freshly slain corpse lying in the next room, and no proof that Bernie isn’t the killer. Now he’s really got his hands full, having to locate the true perpetrator while somehow eluding the police a dirty job indeed, but if Bernie doesn’t do it, who will?

Closing Arguments

Marcus Brennan is a successful small town lawyer on the verge of a breakdown. His wife, Schelle, thinks it’s post traumatic stress disorder from his years as a POW in Vietnam. Planning the dedication of a memorial for Vietnam soldiers, she asks Marcus to say a few words at the ceremony, hoping the experience will help to exorcise his demons. But after agreeing to defend Estella Pritchett, a social worker accused of murdering her lover, Marcus begins a downward spiral into the murky depths of his own past where sex is violent, where love means betrayal, and where his own memories have the power to destroy him…
.

War Babies

Frederick Busch’s novel War Babies is a short, powerful moral tale that sheds light upon the insidious nature of evil and the grip history holds on the lives of the seemingly protected innocent. Peter Santore, the narrator, is an American lawyer in his mid thirties come to England to track down a certain Hilary Pennels, the daughter of a Korean War hero who died in a POW camp the same camp in which Peter’s own father turned traitor and whose informing became, perhaps, the cause of Hilary’s father’s death. Only Hilary’s guardian, Fox himself a survivor of the camp can explain, if he will, the troubling past that haunts the now fully grown ‘War Babies.’ As Frederick Busch’s relentless narrative bears down upon this complexity of betrayals, the lines between exploiter and exploited become eerily blurred.

Harry and Catherine

‘For years Frederick Busch has been at work on one of the most impressive bodies of American fiction.’ Reynolds PriceHere is that rarest and most satisfying of books: a grown up love story. Harry and Catherine have been falling in and out of love for many years. She is divorced, determinedly raising two sons, and running a small gallery in upstate New York. He is an ex newspaperman, a wistful drifter, now assistant to a New York senator. After a long separation, Harry is assigned to find out whether a new shopping mall in Catherine’s neighborhood will desecrate an historic black cemetery. Catherine is living with another man, a contractor for the mall who finds both his financial interests and his relationship with Catherine threatened by Harry. With penetrating acuity and generosity of spirit, one of our finest writers brings us what David Bradley calls ‘a book people will love and be proud of loving.’ ‘Unsuppressed emotion, painful honesty…
all of it in the most lively and supple language anyone is writing today.’ Rosellen Brown

Long Way from Home

‘Absorbing, fast paced and a joy to read.’THE BOSTON GLOBE’AM I YOUR MOTHER?’ The headline screams out to Sarah from the pages of the personal ads. Suddenly seized with an ’emergency feeling,’ she abandons her husband, Barrett, and their six year old son, Stephen, to search for her biological mother in rural Pennyslvania. Barrett, convinced through intuition that Sarah has gone to Santa Fe, deposits Stephen with his in laws and sets off in hot pursuit. From these separate journeys begins a chain of events in which individual memories send a family in desperate search of itself and the shattering truth that awaits them…
. From the author of CLOSING ARGUMENTS.

Girls

A New York Times Notable BookIn the unrelenting cold and bitter winter of upstate New York, Jack and his wife, Fanny, are trying to cope with the desperate sorrow they feel over the death of their young daughter. The loss forms a chasm in their relationship as Jack, a sardonic Vietnam vet, looks for a way to heal them both. Then, in a nearby town, a fourteen year old girl disappears somewhere between her home and church. Though she is just one of the hundreds of children who vanish every year in America, Jack turns all his attention to this little girl. For finding what has become of this child could be Jack’s salvation if he can just get to her in time…
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The Night Inspector

An immensely powerful story, The Night Inspector follows the extraordinary life of William Bartholomew, a maimed veteran of the Civil War, as he returns from the battlefields to New York City, bent on reversing his fortunes. It is there he meets Jessie, a Creole prostitute who engages him in a venture that has its origins in the complexities and despair of the conflict he has left behind. He also befriends a deputy inspector of customs named Herman Melville who, largely forgotten as a writer, is condemned to live in the wake of his vanished literary success and in the turmoil of his fractured family. Delving into the depths of this country’s heart and soul, Frederick Busch’s stunning novel is a gripping portrait of a nation trying to heal from the ravages of war and of one man’s attempt to recapture a taste for life through the surging currents of his own emotions, ambitions, and shattered conscience.

A Memory of War

‘A multilayered love story that affirms Frederick Busch’s reputation as a writer of ‘sublimely dark work of almost unbearable beauty’ Wall Street Journal. Psychologist Alexander Lescziak savors a life of quiet sophistication on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, turning a blind eye to the past of his Polish migr parents. Then a new patient declares that he is the doctor’s half brother, the product of a union between Lescziak’s Jewish mother and a German prisoner of war. The confrontation jolts Lescziak out of his complacency: suddenly, his failing marriage, his wife’s infatuation with his best friend, and the disappearance of his young lover and suicidal patient, Nella, close in on him. Lescziak escapes into the recesses of his imagination, where his mother’s affair with the German prisoner comes to life in precise, gorgeous detail. The novel unfolds into a romance set in England’s Lake District in wartime, as Busch shows how our past presses on the present.

North

A taut, dark, psychological page turner from the best selling author of Girls. Combining the pace of a detective story with the bold prose of a master storyteller, North is both an adventure and a pilgrimage. Alone and haunted by memories of his dead wife and child, Jack who prowled the backwaters of Girls returns to upstate New York from the Carolina coast, where he has been working as a security guard. A New York lawyer hires him to find her missing nephew, last seen in the area of Jack’s Northern hometown. His search gradually uncovers a dark underside of rural life and a cast of dangerous characters. Jack is besieged by memories as he uncovers a brutal crime and finds himself in a turbulent relationship with a treacherous woman. In trying to save another’s life, Jack must relive his own; memory, obsession, and reality fuse; and Jack discovers the truth of Faulkner’s observation that ‘the past is not really past; it’s not even over.’

The Children in the Woods

‘Powerful…
Fiction of a very high order…
Frederick Busch at his best.’ Los Angeles Times Book Review’ These provocative tales center around relationships gone awry, families grappling with loss, and lonely men and women struggling with remnants of love…
. What Busch ultimately serves is a heady and rewarding brew made up of people as real as ourselves, groping for and sometimes even discovering the comforts of love.’ USA Today’Memorable…
The stories leap off the page with astonishing resilience and vigor…
. Busch is a chronicler of domestic manners whose insights into family hierarchies transcend the factual to attain poetry and truth.’ The Boston Globe

Don’t Tell Anyone

Not since Raymond Carver has the soul of the American family been plumbed as eloquently or as poignantly. The hungers of love and the fear of time drive the men and women, sons and daughters in these stories to speak. Frederick Busch renders precisely the need to connect and shows us the ways funny, tender, and heartbreaking in which connections, in spite of love, often fail. In ‘Heads’ a mother is haunted by her own past when her daughter faces an accusation that could send her to jail. In ‘Malvasia’ a daughter gives her bereaved father the courage to go on living. A father suffers over his inability to save his grown son from heartbreak in ‘Passengers.’ ‘The Joy of Cooking’ is a brilliant portrait of a failed marriage. Called a ‘first rate American storyteller’ and ‘master craftsman’ by the New York Times Book Review, Busch brings us into the achingly familiar lives of people caught between the need to tell a story and the fear of speaking out.

Rescue Missions

Stories of mercy and need among lovers, family, and friends by ‘one of our very best short story writers’ Anne Beattie. The war in Iraq is present in some of these stories, and so are the domestic wars; and, in every case, a character seeks to comfort or to save someone. ‘The Rescue Mission’ is narrated by a man who runs a rescue mission out of a trailer in upstate New York. In his attempt to save a young woman from the brutality of her boyfriend, he is forced to confront the reality of his own mother’s death. In ‘Good to Go,’ an estranged couple try to save their grown son from the scars of war. Physical love, familial love, the need to give comfortand the need for comfortare themes skillfully rendered by a master of the short story whose achievements have been acknowledged with the PEN/Malamud Award for short fiction and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award of Merit for lifetime achievement in the short story.

A Dangerous Profession

Frederick Busch, one of America’s most distinguished novelists, has had an enduring love affair with great books and with the difficult, and sometimes personally dangerous, work that is required to produce them. For Busch, as he writes of his own career and those of his great elders, Dickens, Melville, Hemingway, and others, there was to be no other recourse save the dangerous profession. Writing out of an experience of risk that is suffused with affection, Busch brilliantly explores the hazards of the writing life and its effect on the achievement of benchmark writers.

Letters to a Fiction Writer

A collection of inspiring letters from some of our most renowned and respected fiction writers on the craft of writing and the writing life. Contributors include Lee K. Abbott, Charles Baxter, Ray Bradbury, Raymond Carver, Shelby Foote, John Gardner, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, Tobias Wolff, and Flannery O’Connor, among others.

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