Few can do what Ray Glennon can. Many notice, hardly anyone understands. Ray has a secret. Three, actually. Sent away at birth, brought back nearly nine years later to a beleaguered country town called Faith. People stay in their lanes here, do as they’re told, become what they’re expected to be. Ray is different, not an easy thing to be in Faith, making the poor kid a foreigner at home, a target of torment at school. An elderly couple offers solace and the delights within a ceramic jar on their kitchen counter.

As years pass, hardship visits many in Faith, and the community is repeatedly upended by a series of confounding incidents. It escapes no one’s attention that Ray figures in each. Notes written in a hand no one recognizes arrive from who knows where, curiously finding their way into Ray’s possession. Riddling out the cryptic messages brings Ray to the rescue of Faith’s most stricken and to terms with long-concealed truths and hard-to-grasp capabilities. Wonders ensue. A mother sacrifices body and soul. Secrets are revealed, as are faculties of the human spirit that only in the rarest instances get put to use.

Reviews

Mike McCabe is a gifted, gifted storyteller, and in his promising first novel, Miracles Along County Q, he demonstrates an authorial voice that recalls Thornton Wilder or Jane Smiley. Anyone who has ever lived in a small town will connect with this lovely book.

—Nickolas Butler, author of Shotgun Lovesongs and A Forty Year Kiss