Goodnight, Nebraska

July. Nebraska. Saturday Afternoon. At McKibben's Mobil Station, prudently situated at the intersection of Highway 20 and Main Street, a boy, a loner, is the only passenger to step down from the bus. Randall Hunsacker is seventeen, and the small farm town of Goodnight, Nebraska, is his punishment. It's also his last chance to escape events back home - a shooting, a car crash, a family in disarray. And even as he resists absorption into this strange small community, Randall will become a part of it. Goodnight, Nebraska is a stunning first novel about small-town America, where high school football, pheasant hunting and the Friendly Festival are as vital as the wheat harvest. In Randall, Tom McNeal creates an outcast whose redemption lies in Goodnight; and in Goodnight's citizens, he creates an unforgettable populace. "Goodnight, Nebraska" is Randall's story but it's also the story of the town that takes him in, of the widow Lucy Witt, the Lockhardt family, the Eleventh Man Bar and Grill, and the Sleepy Hollow Trailer Court.