November Storm

“Robert Oldshue’s debut collection is deceptive. While one could say these stories are about things as simple as driving in bad weather, seeing the next client, and visiting an old friend in the hospital, each of them is a world concentrated and distilled, filled with compassion, insight, and surprise.”—Peter Turchi, author, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer

“These superb stories are written with a sharp wit, big heart, and profound wisdom. Oldshue’s genius lies in his ability to bring remarkable emotional complexity to the lives of ordinary characters whom we recognize as ourselves. A brilliant debut.”—Helen Fremont, author, After Long Silence: A Memoir

Robert Oldshue writes stories that are as rich and self-complicating as novels. Set mostly in Boston, November Storm explores that city—like Stuart Dybek’s Chicago or Edward P. Jones’s DC—through the layers of its characters’ memories. Here a twenty-page story seems deeper—more densely sedimented with consciousness and retrospection—than most two-hundred-page books. This is a sensitive and accomplished collection.”—Bennett Sims, judge, 2016 Iowa Short Fiction Award

“A dazzling collection of stories, each with the depth and complexity of a novel. Utterly compelling, I read this book almost in one sitting. Robert Oldshue is an exciting and brilliant new literary voice. Perhaps the Great American Novel is now to be found in a collection of extraordinary short stories.”—Rosamund Lupton, author, Sister

“Bob Oldshue has populated his emotionally intricate and very wise stories with lovable, broken people haunted by their actions or indeed by their failures to act. In sentences that tumble and spiral with masterful invisible complexity, November Storm delivers youngsters searching for themselves, oldsters searching for the past, and the middle-aged searching for redemption.”—Shannon Cain, author, The Necessity of Certain Behaviors