The Chinchilla Farm

Raised a Mormon in a small town in Utah, married to a stiflingly conventional adulterer, Verna Flake has gotten tired of pretending. So she heads for Los Angeles, where people have the freedom to find themselves over and over again. In this lyrical and keenly observant novel Judith Freeman captures the solitude, the dislocation, and the offbeat optimism of the American West in a way that raises comparison with writers like Louise Erdrich and Bobbie Ann Mason.