Before You Know Kindness

Chris Bohjalian, bestselling author of Midwives, The Sandcastle Girls, and The Light in the Ruins, presents his most ambitious and multilayered novel to date--examining wildly divisive American issues like gun control and animal rights with his trademark emotional heft and spellbinding storytelling skill.

 On a balmy July night in New Hampshire a shot rings out in a garden, and a man falls to the ground, terribly wounded. The wounded man is Spencer McCullough, the shot that hit him was fired–accidentally?–by his adolescent daughter Charlotte. With this shattering moment of violence, Chris Bohjalian launches the best kind of literate page-turner: suspenseful, wryly funny, and humane.