Mercury: A Novel

A clarion-hearted and capacious new novel from Amy Jo Burns, the acclaimed author of Shiner, Mercury is the story of a family of roofers striving for stability in a hardworking, blue-collar town, and the one woman who becomes their beating heart.

It’s 1990 and Marley West is blazing into the river valley town of Mercury, Pennsylvania. A gorgeous teenager and perpetual loner, she seeks a place at someone’s table and a family of her own. The first thing she sees when she arrives in town are three men standing on a rooftop. Their silhouettes blot out the sun.

The Joseph brothers become Marley’s whole world before she can blink. Soon, she is young wife to one, The One Who Got Away to another, and adopted mother to them all. As their own mother fades away and their roofing business crumbles under the weight of their unwieldy father’s inflated ego, Marley is the one who steps in to shepherd these unruly men towards the unreachable future they were promised.

When an emergency roofing job turns up a dead body in their local church’s attic, old wounds resurface and, suddenly, the Joseph family hangs in the balance. Fair or not, it’s up to Marley to decide what comes next—whether she should give up and leave these maddening men fixed in time and incapable of escaping their father’s shadow, or help them reorient their world towards a future on solid ground.

About the Author

Amy Jo Burns is the author of the memoir Cinderland and the novel Shiner, which was a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick, NPR Best Book of the year, and was “told in language as incandescent as smoldering coal,” according to The New York Times. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, Tin House, Elle, Good Housekeeping, Ploughshares, Electric Literature, Literary Hub, and the anthology Not That Bad. You can find her on Twitter @amyjoburns and on Instagram @burnsamyjo.