Maksik is one of the most exacting and daring writers we have. His new novel, Shelter in Place, is about mental illness, family ties and violence. Maksik has a reputation as a writer of elegant sentences, but the new work is more rugged and chiseled than You Deserve Nothing or A Marker to Measure Drift. Joseph March, fresh out of college and enduring a bipolar break, goes deep into the Pacific Northwest countryside to be near his mother’s prison. From the first sentence, there’s no turning away from this story: “In the summer of 1991 my mother beat a man to death with a twenty-two ounce Estwing framing hammer and I fell in love with Tess Wolff.”
