Tony Earley has a voice and a sensibility that cuts to the heart of the way we live today. He’s not smug, he’s not self-consciously hip, he’s not flashy. He writes in a deceptively simple style, yet his work reveals a complex mind, a empathetic heart, and a questing spirit.

In Somehow Form a Family, Earley writes about finding a place in a world without losing sight of where you came from. In his late 30s, he is neither a Boomer nor a GenXer. He stands with one foot in the rural South and one foot in the ersatz suburbia of the Brady Bunch. Candidly discussing his struggles with clinical depression, he confronts the big issues—God, death, civilization, family—with grace and wit, without glibness or evasion. Whether he’s imagining his mountaineer grandmother’s only foray into the wider world, tracking ghosts with a parapsychologist and finding his dead sister, or dodging suicide, Earley has clearly lost patience with the knee-jerk irony so prevalent around young writers today. His is a journey into authenticity, from faith through unbelief and into a new faith—a journey “toward whatever miracle comes up next.”