Winner of the 2026 W.Y. Boyd Literary Novel Award “for excellence in military fiction21-year-old Jonas Boulware has come home to Copernicus, his small southern town, after serving as a medic in the Middle East, where he was severely wounded performing a heroic act. As his body heals, he keeps memories of the trauma at bay. He doesn't remember and doesn't intend to. He is home, trying to figure out who he has become and how he can deal with it. But trauma assails him in Copernicus, too: an abusive father and a mother who bears the burden of a long-ago family scandal. He renews friendships - a high school classmate, a physician/mentor, and the Black owner of a golf course. An instinctual caregiver, Jonas takes in (and falls in love with) a down-on-her-luck young folksinger, he tries to rescue a teenaged boy from his squalid, dangerous home life. But bits and pieces of his wartime trauma intrude in nightmares and flashbacks, until he admits that he suffers from PTSD and must come to grips
