EAST OF DENVER

East of Denver is a remarkably assured, sharply observed, and utterly memorable debut. We're getting terrific reads for this one--the novel is at once heartwarming and cruel, the dialogue sharp and funny.

When Stacey "Shakespeare" Williams arrives at his family's farm in eastern Colorado, he finds that his widowed and senile father, Emmett, is living in squalor, and Unabelle, the elderly neighbor who'd been caring for him, lies dead behind the locked bathroom door.

With no job and no prospects, Shakespeare suddenly finds himself caretaker to both his dad and the farm. They have no money, the land is fallow, and a local banker has cheated his father out of the majority of the farm equipment as well as his beloved Cessna. Shakespeare falls in with an unlikely clique of former classmates: Vaughn Atkins, a paraplegic confined to his mother's basement; Carissa McPhail, an overweight bank teller who pitches for the local softball team; and longtime bully D. J. Beckman, who's now a drug dealer. Facing the loss of the farm, Shakespeare hatches a half-serious plot with Emmett and his fellow misfits to rob the very bank that has stolen their future.

Gregory Hill lives in Denver, where he works at the University of Denver library and plays in the Babysitters, a rock-and-roll power trio that includes his wife on drums.