In 1971, a property speculator named Harley Mann begins recording his life story onto a reel-to-reel machine. After his father’s sudden death, his family migrated down to Florida’s swamplands --- mere miles away from what would become Disney World --- to join a community of Shakers. Led by Elder John, the colony devoted itself to labor, faith and charity, rejecting all temptations that lay beyond the property. But when Harley began falling in love with Sadie Pratt, a consumptive patient living on the grounds, his loyalty to the Shakers and their conservative worldview grew strained and, ultimately, broke. As Harley dictates his story across more than half a century, the truth about Sadie, Elder John and the Shakers comes to light, clarifying the past and present alike.

At the center of FOREGONE is famed Canadian American leftist documentary filmmaker Leonard Fife, one of 60,000 draft evaders and deserters who fled to Canada to avoid serving in Vietnam. Fife, now in his late 70s, is dying of cancer in Montreal and has agreed to a final interview in which he is determined to bare all his secrets at last, to demythologize his mythologized life. The interview is filmed by his acolyte and ex–star student, Malcolm MacLeod, in the presence of Fife’s wife and alongside Malcolm’s producer, cinematographer and sound technician, all of whom have long admired Fife but who must now absorb the meaning of his astonishing, dark confession.

The 12 stories in A PERMANENT MEMBER OF THE FAMILY examine the myriad ways that we try --- and sometimes fail --- to connect with one another, as we seek a home in the world. The book charts with subtlety and precision the ebb and flow of both the families we make for ourselves and the ones we're born into, as it asks how we know the ones we love and, in turn, ourselves.

Suspended in a strangely modern-day version of limbo, the young man at the center of Russell Banks’s new novel must create a life for himself in the wake of incarceration. On probation after doing time for a liaison with an underage girl, he is shackled to a GPS monitoring device and forbidden to live within 2,500 feet of anywhere children might gather.