Patrick Ryan conjures a vanished America with deep insight and lyrical intelligence about war and adultery, the mysteries of sexuality and family life, and the strange paths we have to travel to forgive or at least begin to understand the people who’ve hurt us the most.  A small-town novel about two midwestern families across generations, from World War II to the late twentieth century.  In Bonhomie, Ohio, a stolen moment of passion, sparked in the exuberant aftermath of the Allied victory in Europe, binds Cal Jenkins, a man wounded not in war but by his inability to serve in it, to Margaret Salt, a woman trying to obscure her past. Cal’s wife, Becky has a spiritual gift: She is a seer who can conjure the dead, helping families connect with those they’ve lost. Margaret’s husband, Felix is serving on a Navy cargo ship, out of harm’s way-until a telegram suggests that the unthinkable might have happened.

Cal Jenkins, born in the spring of 1920 with one leg shorter than the other, just two inches shorter, but that was enough to make plenty of things difficult. Balancing on a bicycle took twice as long for him to learn as it did for other kids. Waking without a pronounced limp or going up and down a set of stairs without securing himself on the railing-until his father , amateur carpenter and junk collector, improved Cal’s condition  by carving a new thicker sole out of tire runner and nailing it into his left shoe. At school boys made fun of the way Cal walked, then made fun of the shoe with the extra-thick sole.

Later, as the country reconstructs in the postwar boom, a secret grows in Bonhomie-but nothing stays buried forever in a small town. Against the backdrop of some of the most transformative decades in modern America the consequences of that long-ago encounter ripple through the next generation of both families, compelling them, to re-examine who they thought they were and what the future might hold.

Sweeping yet intimate, rich with piercing observation and the warmth that comes from profound understanding of the human spirit, Buckeye captures the universal longing for love and for goodness.

Buckeye by Patrick Ryan,  Bloomsbury £25, Random House $30, 464 pages.