Waltz in Marathon: A Novel

Charles Dickinson

Sep 2015 · Sold by Harper Collins

About this ebook

Shy and compassionate moneylender Harry Waltz is the richest man in Marathon, Michigan, and at sixty-one, has dedicated his life to bringing “honor and gentlemanliness” to loan-sharking. His wife died twenty years ago, he lost one son in Vietnam, helped put the other in prison, and his twin daughters have grown up and moved away. He lives alone in a large house surrounded by repossessed automobiles, and expects his life to continue at the quiet pace he is accustomed to.

But when he falls in love with forty-two-year-old lawyer Mary Hale, everything changes. She gets his son out of prison, and he moves back home, along with the twin daughters, one of whom is pregnant by her out-of work husband, and the other who is enamored with the same man. To complicate his life even further, his clients have stopped paying their debts, and now it seems that he is losing any sense of the stability he had come to rely on.

About the author

With seven highly acclaimed books to his credit, Charles Dickinson takes American fiction back to the complexity of modern life and love with his characteristically incisive irony and humor. Critics have compared him to such masters as Margaret Atwood, Ann Tyler, Michael Crichton and Raymond Carver.His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire and The Atlantic, among others, and two stories, "Risk" and "Child in the Leaves," were included in O. Henry collections. He has received generous praise for his novels, Waltz in Marathon, Crows, The Widows’ Adventures, Rumor Has It, A Shortcut in Time, and its sequel, A Family in Time, and his collection of stories, With or Without.Born in Detroit, Dickinson lives near Chicago with his wife.