An incredibly compulsive, poignant exploration of marriage, lust, and ambition from one of America’s great young literary talents, the Man-Booker Prize longlisted author of Work Like Any Other.

Doctor Ed Malinowski believes he has realized most of his dreams. A passionate, ambitious behavioral psychiatrist, he is now the superintendent of a mental institution and finally turning the previously crumbling hospital around. He also has a home he can be proud of, and a fiercely independent, artistic wife Laura, whom he hopes will soon be pregnant.

But into this perfect vision of his life comes Penelope, a beautiful, young epileptic who should never have been placed in his institution and whose only chance at getting out is Ed. She is intelligent, charming, and slowly falling in love with her charismatic, compassionate doctor. As their relationship grows more complicated, and Laura stubbornly starts working at his hospital, Ed must weigh his professional responsibilities against his personal ones, and find a way to save both his job and his family.

A love triangle set in one of the most chaotic, combustible settings imaginable, The Behavior of Love is wise, riveting, and deeply resonant.

Roscoe T. Martin, the son of an Alabama coal foreman, set his sights on a new type of power spreading at the start of the twentieth century: electricity. It became his training, his life’s work. But when his wife Marie inherits her father’s failing farm, Roscoe has to give it up, with great cost to his pride and sense of self, to rescue the farm for the sake of his marriage and his family. Realizing he might lose them all if he doesn’t improve the place, he enlists the help of his black farmhand, Wilson, and begins to use his skills as an electrician to siphon energy from the state, ushering in a period of bounty and happiness on land that had been falling to ruin. Even the love of Marie and their child seems back within Roscoe’s grasp.

Then a young man working for the power company is electrocuted after stumbling on Roscoe’s illegal lines, and everything changes: Roscoe is arrested for manslaughter, Wilson is leased to a coal mine, the farm once more starts to deteriorate without electricity, and Marie abandons her husband as he goes to trial, leaving him to face his twenty-year sentence alone. No longer an electrician or even a farmer, an unmoored Roscoe must now carve out his place in a violent new world. Climbing the ranks from dairy hand to librarian to “dog boy,” an inmate who aids the guards track down escapees, he is ultimately forced to ask himself once more if his work is just work or if the price of his crimes–for him and his family–is greater than he ever let himself believe.

Gorgeously spare and brilliantly insightful, Work like Any Other announces a major work from an incredible young talent–a deeply affecting story of dispossession, injustice, and redemption that explores the lengths to which the broken among us push forward.