At the opening of Bonnie Nadzam's novel Lions, the small village of Lions, Colo., is on the verge of vanishing. So much so, in fact, that even the people whose families have been there for generations are starting to disappear. First John Walker, the enigmatic patriarch of a family of welders and pioneers, unexpectedly dies at the beginning of an exceptionally hot summer. Then everyone around him starts to slowly recede. Walker's son Gordon begins to take long, unannounced trips into the high plains, leaving his longtime girlfriend, Leigh, to second-guess her entire world. The local bar owner, Boyd, begins to wonder about his future in a town where his best customer seems to be losing his mind and the one mechanic in town ups and leaves for a city down south.
Lions is both a place and a feeling. To Nadzam (Lamb), the hot, high plains east of the Rocky Mountains feels like a summer day cooling down just after sunset and you're thinking about both your past and your future as if they are both too far away to grasp. In Lions, Colo., time has forsaken its people. To the few families left in town, the promise of the future came and went without anyone noticing and has left them unable to catch back up.
Lions is both beautiful and unsettling, its prose both sharp and panoramic. In the expansive western prairie, Nadzam has crafted a world where the future is long forgotten. --Josh Potter