Wildlife — Richard Ford

A novel of a fracturing family in 1960 Montana, “full of prose that makes the reader shiver,” by the New York Times-bestselling author of Rock Springs (Chicago Sun-Times).
 
When Joe Brinson was sixteen, his father moved the family to Great Falls, Montana. But the new start didn't go quite as planned. Jerry Brinson is a golf pro to rich country club members, but then loses the job. In reaction, he joins a firefighting crew working in the mountains -- as his wife becomes entangled in an affair with one of the businessmen from the club.
 
Told from the point of view of Joe as a grown man looking back on those days in 1960, Wildlife is a “heartbreaking and compelling” novel about love, family, and the forces that test them to the breaking point by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Canada and The Sportswriter (Philadelphia Inquirer).
 
The basis for a film starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Carey Mulligan, Wildlife is “a wise, humane, and disarmingly simple novel of domestic distress” (Entertainment Weekly).
 
“There is at the heart of this novel a deep nostalgia for that moment when a person recognizes a true perfection in the way things once were, before the onset of ruin and great change.” -- The New York Times Book Review