About the Book:

A dead mother, a deaf cat, an ex-nun, and a waitress forced to dress as a milkmaid–these are some of the ordinary characters that populate the extraordinary stories in Christine Lasek’s Love Letters to Michigan.  This homage to the Great Lakes State and its residents is a remarkable debut that establishes Christine Lasek as a writer to watch.

–Rita Ciresi, author of Pink Slip and Sometimes I Dream in Italian

These patient, heartfelt stories of Midwestern life are shadowed by loss, by straightened economic circumstances (they’re also, not coincidentally, stories of tenuous middle class life), by loneliness. And yet they also glow with an affecting and very human stoicism; their quiet desperation matched by a quiet decency amounting to hope. These characters endure, as their stories deserve to.

–Peter Ho Davies, author of The Welsh Girl and The Ugliest House in the World