After her aspiring hockey star and big brother Jamie dies, Samantha Riley's family goes into a tailspin. Her father becomes a workaholic and her mother goes into an almost comatose sleep. Fourteen-year-old Samantha is left trying to hold the family and the farm together, something she's not sure she's cut out for. Then one night, after an argument with her father, Samantha and her dog Reliable get lost in a violent storm. Eventually they find shelter in an abandoned silo where she finds the surprise of her lifetime. There's a boy living in the silo And, he looks an awful lot like her dead...

If the big question is What is normal? then the big answer has to be Certainly not us But Peterson isn't concerned with norms. What he wants us to know is that the world is full of wonder and mystery and surprises. We just have to be paying attention. From ice fishing on a couch, to dogs that are angels, to modern-day fertility rites, these stories will thrust you into the deep messiness of life and yet somehow you'll come away feeling hopeful. In this, the toughest of forms, Peterson excels.

Walking home from work one day with flowers for his wife, Leif Peterson discovers a Missing Person poster with his name and face on it. How can this be? A strange mistake? A cruel joke? It should be easy enough to ignore, but for some reason he can't. And then an anonymous text message on his phone sets into motion a chain of events that he could never have imagined. Oddly compelled to act impulsively, Leif soon finds himself in another city, in another country, in another hemisphere, with very little memory of his past, searching for a woman he knows by name, but whom he's never met....