Dancing Naked: A Novel

Terry Walker is an even-tempered, successful mathematics professor, comfortable with his world—the order and predictability of it. He likes the kind of life one lives in a quiet Salt Lake City subdivision. At his children’s births, he masks his terror with numbers—his wife’s contractions and dilations, blood pressure, heart rate. At funerals he absorbs his grief by calculating the cubic feet of earth the coffin and vault will displace.

But control is illusive, something his fifteen-year-old ...