By Will Allison
210 pages; Free Press

No wonder the characters in Will Allison's moving debut novel, What You Have Left (Free Press), have a taste for car racing: What better sport for people whose hearts run full throttle, barely skirting disaster? Allison's quiet prose gets at a mother's raw nerve, a father's desperate evasions, the daredevil rage of an abandoned daughter, and the anxiety of a husband curbing his own destructive impulses as he gauges the risks of love.

— Cathleen Medwick