Chris Bohjalian, bestselling author of Midwives, The Sandcastle Girls, and The Light in the Ruins, presents his most ambitious and multilayered novel to date--examining wildly divisive American issues like gun control and animal rights with his trademark emotional heft and spellbinding storytelling skill. On a balmy July night in New Hampshire a shot rings out in a garden, and a man falls to the ground, terribly wounded. The wounded man is Spencer McCullough, the shot that hit him was fired-accidentally?-by his adolescent daughter Charlotte. With this shattering moment of violence, Chris Bohjalian launches the best kind of literate page-turner: suspenseful, wryly funny, and humane.