"Joe Keen and Ana Urbanek have been a couple for a long time, with all the requisite lulls and temptations, yet they remain unmarried and without children or a mortgage, as their Midwestern values (and parents) seem to require. Now on the cusp of forty, they are both working at jobs that they're not even sure they believe in anymore, but with significantly varying returns. Ana is successful, Joe is floundering--both in limbo, caught somewhere between...

"Twenty-five years after his high school graduation, David Halpert returns to a place that most people flee. But David is making his own escape--from his divorce and the death of his son. In Detroit, David learns about the double shooting of his high school girlfriend Natalie and her black half-brother, Dirk. As David becomes involved with Natalie's sister, he will discover that both he and his hometown have reasons to hope. As compelling an urban...

"... a city of roughly 770,000 inhabitants -- a city now 89 percent Black -- has collapsed in a sea of financial mismanagement, crime, drugs, broken schools, eroding infrastructure, and hopelessness. Detroit is the story of America's future"--P. [4] of cover.