Leif Enger · 2001 · road

Leif Enger's 2001 debut. A Minnesota school janitor who may perform miracles loads his two younger children into a Plymouth wagon in January 1963, hitches a new Airstream to it, and drives into the North Dakota badlands looking for the son who shot two men on his own staircase and then broke out of jail.

1. 1
   Roofing

   A Minnesota town Enger invented out of the country he grew up in. Jeremiah Land is the school janitor, Reuben is eleven and asthmatic, Swede is nine and writing westerns - and Davy, seventeen, shoots two intruders on the stairs.

2. 2
   Fargo

   January 1963, and the Lands leave in a green Plymouth wagon towing a brand-new twenty-foot Airstream, heading west into a Dakota winter after a son who broke out of jail and stole a horse.

3. 3
   Linton

   Across the frozen middle of North Dakota, living in the trailer and depending on the kindness of strangers - and Reuben narrating a journey in which the miracles are real and nobody in the family will say so plainly.

4. 4
   The Badlands

   The broken country along the Little Missouri, which Swede has been writing outlaw poems about for two years and now has to live in - buckets full of horizon, Reuben calls it, and no sign of Davy anywhere in it.

5. 5
   Jape Waltzer's

   An isolated homestead deep in the badlands where Davy has holed up with a man who is genuinely dangerous - and where the book's ending happens, which readers argue about and which Reuben tells us he saw.