Where You Live

by Andrew Roe

The California of Where You Live might have sun, surf, and sand, but it’s more densely populated with cracking marriages, accidental pregnancies, and shitty jobs. Andrew Roe’s Californians face sharp points of change: Stay or go? Love or leave? Run or get stuck? Their choices, like our own, reveal life’s stark limitations and its wide-open vistas all at once.

Full of lush prose and unforgettable imagery, the stories in Where You Live shine an unforgiving yet shimmering light on longing, loss, and the everyday catastrophes of life.

Genres: Short Stories

240 pages, Paperback

First published May 16, 2017

About the author

Andrew Roe is the author of The Miracle Girl, a Los Angeles Times Book Award finalist, and Where You Live, a short story collection. His fiction has been published in Tin House, One Story, The Sun, Glimmer Train, Slice, The Cincinnati Review, and other publications, as well as the anthologies 24 Bar Blues (Press 53) and Where Love Is Found (Washington Square Press). His nonfiction has been published in the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Salon.com, Writer's Digest,and elsewhere. He lives in Pleasant Hill, California, with his wife and three children.

Reviews

[Adrianne · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poignancy of short stories. Local author (Oceanside, CA) Andrew Roe starts with the heart of the matter and carries you on an outward flow. How can you know/feel so much in so few pages? Therein is the brilliance of short stories and my dislike of them; they suck you in and then are gone abruptly.

[David Olsen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful collection 13 years in the making.

[Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Andrew Roe’s “Where You Live” is a great collection of short stories. Many of them are about missed connections – a phlebotomist yearning for an ex-patient, a father trying to come up with the perfect thing to tell his sons, a young couple fumbling over their relationship at the advent of a pregnancy. The collection’s disaffected yet poignant characters wander through these pages as if they are fumbling around in a dark room, trying to find the door. But Roe keeps the sliver of hope burning in the keyhole, making for great reading on the beach or wherever you are this summer.

[Ethel Rohan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a rich read. Wonderful meditations, too, on place, work, class, choices, fate, freewill, and self-determination. Terrific tension and surprise throughout with excellent prose, memorable characters, and honest tenderness.

[Elizabeth Gray · Rating 5 out of 5]

Haunting and realistic, this book spoke to me.

[Ann Theis]

Kirkus