Coal Run

In a town haunted by a deadly mine explosion three decades earlier, Ivan Zoschenko, the local deputy and erstwhile football legend, "the great Ivan Z," spends a week preparing for a former teammate's imminent release from prison. In doing so, Ivan introduces a rich cast of characters - his fiercely independent single-mom sister, the long-absent Vietnam vet he idolized as a child, and the old friend and onetime mirror image who now lives the kind of ordinary life Ivan both admires and pities. Coal Run is an uncompromising and absorbing novel about letting go of the goals of greatness for the ordinary grace of hard work, family ties, and an acceptance of where you come from.