Published in 2016
262 pages
Virginia Reeves is a writer and a teacher. A graduate of the Michener Center for Writers, her debut novel, Work Like Any Other, was longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and the Man Booker Prize. Booklist named it to their Top 10 First Novels of 2016, and the French translation, Un travail comme un autre won the Page/America prize and the SensCritique prize for best American debut. After seven years in Texas, Virginia recently returned to her home in Montana. She lives in Helena with her husband, two daughters, and three-legged pit bull.
What is this book about?
Roscoe T Martin set his sights on a new type of power spreading at the start of the twentieth century: electricity. It became his training, his life’s work. But when his wife, Marie, inherits her father’s failing farm, Roscoe has to give up his livelihood, with great cost to his sense of self, his marriage, and his family. Realizing he might lose them all if he doesn’t do something, he begins to use his skills as an electrician to siphon energy from the state, ushering in a period of bounty and happiness. Even the love of Marie and their child seem back within Roscoe’s grasp.
Then a young man working for the state power company stumbles on Roscoe’s illegal lines and is electrocuted, and everything changes: Roscoe is arrested; the farm once more starts to deteriorate; and Marie abandons her husband, leaving him to face his twenty-year sentence alone. Now an unmoored Roscoe must carve out a place at Kilby Prison. Climbing the ranks of the incarcerated from dairy hand to librarian to “dog boy,” an inmate who helps the guards track down escapees, he is ultimately forced to ask himself once more if his work is just that, or if the price of his crimes—for him and his family—is greater than he ever let himself believe.
