A Book of Fields — Stephen Billias

Three kids rob a diner in Greenfield where everyone knows them. A boy goes to the Big E in West Springfield and runs away with the circus. An animal control officer has to shoot a moose in Sheffield. A ghost still roams the flooded and sunken town of Enfield. A prep school teacher in Old Deerfield reenacts the raid of 1704 with his students, to disastrous results. These deceptively simple fictional stories share two commonalities—first, each one ends in the name of a town that ends in “field”--Ashfield, Northfield, Plainfield, and so forth. Second, most of the stories contain a crime, or something like one, but this is not a crime novel. It’s an exploration of this magical landscape in the Pioneer Valley (or slightly beyond), populated not by magicians or wizards but by very real human beings; it’s a portrait of a changing world and the men and women who inhabit it: hardy, independent, passionate, hardheaded, sometimes a little crazy.