Adam Bennett's life has taken a horrible turn for the worse. After a traumatic head injury sustained at work leaves him prone to violent and unpredictable behavior, his beloved wife and daughter are forced to flee for their safety. Adam's condition is eventually controlled with medication, but it seems his family is gone for good. He is unable to locate them. Miserable and lonely, Adam decides to commit suicide by drowning in the Pacific Ocean after a final cross-country hitchhiking journey. Along the way, Adam encounters a series of unusual characters, all with Biblical names, who seem to share a common interest in his salvation. But Adam's denial and rigid ways are hard to penetrate. Despite experiences he is unable to explain, he remains ambivalent about living as he nears they journey's end. In Las Vegas, a mysterious and compelling man knows things only one man could know. He waits to take Adam to the ocean. Why did he choose to end his life in this most unlikely manner? Who are the people who have helped him along the way? Dare he believe that his final chauffer is Jesus Christ himself? And will that be enough to save him?

Why him? Why here? Why now? Caroline Pierce O'Leary expects to work hard to earn her passage to the Oregon Country. She doesn't expect to find that the wagon train scout is a man with whom she shares a troubled past. Though Caroline is a Christian now, thanks to her late husband, she finds forgiving Michael to be the hardest part of her journey, harder even than the Trail. Michael Moriarty thought he'd left his past behind in "green and hurting Ireland." Seeing Caroline on his wagon train, brings his past to the forefront. With a price on his head, he doesn't want her to get hurt, but he can't deny what they were...and could still be. Michael once betrayed Caroline in the worst possible way. Can she trust him to get her across the Oregon Trail? Can he trust himself to accept her forgiveness and God's?

Jeffery O'Donnell is captivated by the mysterious Simone, who arrives at his office hoping to acquire a position as a Harvey Girl at the popular way-stops along the frontier rail line. Jeffery is torn, however, when he suspects that Simone may harbor a disturbing secret. Westward Chronicles Book 1.

Simone Dumas flees from her abusive father and is hired by Jeffrey O'Donnell to work as a Harvey Girl at the Topeka Harvey House.

Worlding the Western views the fiction of the Western United States as a focal point for a reexamination of the consequences of the exceptionalism and closed borders of the Trump Era. At a time of bounded individualism, new nativism, climate emergency, and migration crises, author Neil Campbell argues that fiction offers opportunities to challenge the dark side of globalization. He proposes worlding as a different and more open form of politics. Diversity, disparity, and opposition are central to the dynamic frictional fiction considered in this book. The American West provides a powerful test case in which these features are present and yet, historically, have often been masked or denied in the rush toward unanimity and nation building. Worlding is, therefore, a positive, critical concept through which to view the notion of a single world under pressure.

Hope and future are not the terms with which James Joyce has usually been read, but this book paints a picture of Joyce's fiction in which hope and future assume the primary colours. Rando explores how Joyce's texts, as early as Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, delineate a complex hope that is oriented toward the future with restlessness, dissatisfaction, and invention. He examines how Joyce envisions alternatives to the prevailing conventions of hope throughout his works and, in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, develops formal techniques of spatializing hope to contemplate it from all sides. Casting fresh light on the ways in which hope animates key aspects of Joyce's approach to literary content and form, Rando moves beyond the limitations of negative critique and literary historicism to present a Joyce who thinks agilely about the future, politics, and possibility.