Inhabited

by Charlie Quimby

Overview

"The lives of Quimby's finely drawn characters interweave to produce a panorama as wide and full of light as the near–desert setting."

—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, starred review


Meg Mogrin sells pricey houses, belongs to the mayor's inner circle, and knows more than she's letting on about her sister's death. Isaac Samson lives in a tent and believes Thomas Edison invented the Reagan presidency. When their town attracts a game–changing development, Isaac is displaced by the town's crackdown on vagrancy. As Isaac struggles to regain stability, Meg contends with conflicting roles of assisting the developer while serving on the homeless coalition. Isaac's quest to return a lost artifact soon intrudes into Meg's tidy world, digging up a part of her past she'd rather remained buried. Inhabited, a sister novel to Charlie Quimby's acclaimed Monument Road, returns to the Grand Valley of western Colorado to explore the dimensions of loss, the boundaries of compassion, and the endurance of love.


CHARLIE QUIMBY is the author of Monument Road, an Indie Next List pick and Booklist Editors' Choice. He began his writing career as playwright and arts journalist, veered into corporate communications and then founded a marketing agency that now purrs along without him. Along the way, he collected awards and developed the notion he had a few good novels in him. A native Coloradan and adopted Minnesotan, he is at home in both places.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781937226671
Publisher:	Torrey House Press
Publication date:	10/11/2016
Pages:	345
Product dimensions:	7.90(w) x 5.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

CHARLIE QUIMBY is the author of Monument Road, an Indie Next List pick and Booklist Editors' Choice. He began his writing career as playwright and arts journalist, veered into corporate communications and then founded a marketing agency that now purrs along without him. Along the way, he collected awards and developed the notion he had a few good novels in him. A native Coloradan and adopted Minnesotan, he is at home in both places.

Editorial Reviews

★ 12/05/2016
In this hopeful novel, Quimby (Monument Road) portrays two lives and a small city at a moment of change. Meg Mogrin is a real estate agent, and therefore naturally aligned with development interests, but she’s also a member of the Grand Junction, Colo., Homeless Coalition. In her past she has been a teacher, a wife, a sister, and something a bit more than a witness to the death of a serial killer. Isaac Samson is a homeless man with a library science degree who functions well most days but who is also troubled by voices and conspiracy theories. Lew Hungerman is considering moving the headquarters of Betterment Health to town at the same time that homeless crusader Wesley Chambers wants the city to approve a permanent tent city for the homeless. The lives of Quimby’s finely drawn characters interweave to produce a panorama as wide and full of light as the near-desert setting. Even his minor figures add significantly to the whole, and his skillful and delightful turns of phrase make reading this evocative novel a pleasure. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"Inhabited spotlights the complex forces behind the spaces we call home."

—MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE


"The lives of Quimby's finely drawn characters interweave to produce a panorama as wide and full of light as the near–desert setting. Skillful and delightful turns of phrase make reading this evocative novel a pleasure."

—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, starred review


"Quimby's descriptions of Colorado's high country show a painterly flare…an intriguing examination of people and a place in transition."

—KIRKUS REVIEWS


"Quimby's experiences as a Colorado native and an advocate for the homeless provide the novel's backbone, but its real strength is in its cast of vivid, relatable individuals. Recommend to readers attuned to Kent Haruf, Annie Proulx, Laura Pritchett, and Bonnie Nadzam."

—BOOKLIST


"An outstanding novel with memorable, believable characters who deal simultaneously with the challenges of reclaiming and redeeming themselves as well as the landscapes that define their communities."

—THE UTAH REVIEW


"Charlie Quimby is a writer with a big talent, big heart, and big social conscience. In his second novel, Inhabited, characters finely drawn and memorable live amidst the crisscrossing lines of moral conscience, political juggling and economic expediency, a tough neighborhood. I was staggered by the authenticity of these people and their dilemmas."

—FAITH SULLIVAN, author of Goodnight, Mr. Wodehouse


"A dramatic, honest, humane portrait of a Colorado city in the throes of great change and great choice. A vivid, compelling story delivered with 21st–century true grit."

—ALYSON HAGY, author of Boleto


"A thoroughly enjoyable novel that masterfully takes the reader on an emotionally rewarding exploration of 'home' and the power the concept has on the human psyche."

—JONATHAN ODELL, author of Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League


"A layered drama about our responsibilities to each other and the blunders and scars we must endure. I salute Charlie Quimby for following the path of Steinbeck and Orwell in writing empathetic portraits of the ignored and the shunned."
—JIM LYNCH, author of Before the Wind

From the Publisher

11/15/2016
In this follow-up to his debut novel, Monument Road, Quimby returns to his native western Colorado and the city of Grand Junction, a town built at the confluence of the Colorado and Gunnison Rivers. It's on the riverbanks that Quimby's story begins. The banks are covered in invasive tamarisk, ideal thickets for concealing homeless encampments. Realtor Meg Mogrin joins the Homeless Coalition as just another civic duty, but when she accompanies the police homeless outreach team to an encampment, she comes face-to-face with a dark reality. Afterward, when another encampment is burned out by what the local newspaper calls a brush fire, with no mention of the displaced, Meg becomes more concerned, starting to see them as individuals with past lives, families, and basic needs. A developer promises economic revival, but Meg soon realizes that some community figures favor the developer's money over potential solutions to the homeless problem. Meanwhile, she wrestles with a dark secret tied to her sister's murder 20 years earlier. VERDICT Using familiar characters from Monument Road, Quimby casts a novelist's keen eye on a portion of society who live without secure and safe shelter. His compassion and insight make the story irresistible.—Donna Bettencourt, Mesa Cty. P.L., Grand Junction, CO

Library Journal

2016-08-03
Meg Mogrin tries to do the right thing, something she’s failed at once before, as she’s dragged into clashes between homeless people and business interests in Grand Junction, Colorado.Meg once taught. Then her sister was murdered by Neulan, a serial killer who escaped arrest. Then Neulan died in a fall. Meg and her husband, Brian, were involved. Meg’s moral center shifted, and her marriage collapsed. Burdened by guilt, she left teaching for real estate. Still plagued by guilt, she does penance by devoting energy to a local organization, the Homeless Coalition. Now her friend Eve Winslow, the city's mayor, and other major players are subtly hinting that Meg should help displace the homeless from the scrubland where they've been living to secure a location for a multimillion dollar project, the Betterment Longevity Institute. In narrative threads ebbing and flowing, a lot happens: Betterment’s smarmy Lew Hungerman wants to sleep with Meg and use her to roust the homeless; a brilliant homeless man, Isaac Samson, discovers a clue to Neulan’s death; Pandora Cox, an edgy teen who earned a scholarship sponsored by Meg, instead heads for the North Dakota oil fields with her controlling boyfriend. Quimby’s (Monument Road, 2013, etc.) descriptions of Colorado’s high country show a painterly flare, and he offers keen insights into human dynamics—as when Meg meditates on a man’s "power of denial and condescension." Quimby also writes powerfully of marriage and its meaning, as Meg and Brian, doing his own penance at an isolated reservation, dance quietly toward reconciliation. The opening two-thirds of the story reads as a complex setting of scene and circumstances, but then Quimby charges toward an emotionally satisfying conclusion.More angst than action, more internal conflict than outright adventure, yet an intriguing examination of people and a place in transition.

Kirkus Review