Stephanie Merry, deputy editor

Being in the book recommendation business requires a certain degree of comfort with failure; there are always gems slipping through the cracks. So it went with this debut story collection, which escaped my notice before its publication but couldn’t be ignored for long, what with all the awards and accolades. It turns out these 12 connected stories about life on the Penobscot Indian Island Reservation in Maine are as striking as readers claimed. Tragedy is never far from the characters’ lives, whether it’s addiction or divorce, dementia or death, but the vibrant language and mordant humor soften the blow. While the stories hop around in time, the funny, frank narrator, David, remains a fixture. At the start, he’s a young man looking for weed when he happens upon his friend Fellis struggling to free himself from a frigid swamp where he had drunkenly dozed off. With Fellis’s long braid frozen to the earth, David is forced to lop off the hair with a pocketknife. Fellis’s mistake could have been fatal, but neither seems too bothered. “I never thought I’d scalp a fellow tribal member,” David deadpans. The misfortunes that befall David, his family and his friends can be hard to bear, but his voice, ever sardonic, keeps readers coming back for more.