Good Minds Suggest: Leif Enger's Favorite Small Town Novels

Leif Enger, whose novel Peace Like a River was a national bestseller, returns this fall with Virgil Wander, the story of a small-town movie house owner whose perspective is changed after an encounter with death.

Midwestern movie house owner Virgil Wander is "cruising along at medium altitude" when his car flies off the road into icy Lake Superior. Virgil survives, but his language and memory are altered and he emerges into a world no longer familiar to him. Awakening in this new life, Virgil begins to piece together his personal history and the lore of his broken hometown of Greenstone, Minnesota, with the help of a cast of affable and curious locals—from Rune, a kite-flying stranger investigating the mystery of his disappeared son; to Nadine, the reserved, enchanting wife of the vanished man; to Tom, a journalist and Virgil's oldest friend; and a prodigal son whose return might bring either ruin or renewal.

Enger grew up in Osakis, Minnesota, and worked as a reporter for Minnesota Public Radio before writing Peace Like a River. His second novel, So Brave, Young, and Handsome, was also a national bestseller and won the High Plains Book Award for Fiction.

"Little towns like Greenstone have the advantage of a finite cast of characters, most of whom are acquainted and presume to know each other's motives," Enger says. "That makes for a rich stew of conflict, betrayal, and misunderstanding, not to mention romantic longings and acts of outsized decency, but most of my favorite small-town stories are those where old patterns are upended by accidents, fateful twists, or exhumed secrets. Here are five books whose small-town characters defy prediction and to which I keep returning."