In 1959, Kevin Fenton was born on a family farm overlooking Rollingstone, Minnesotaa tight-knit village founded by Luxembourgers and so Catholic that the parish school was the only school in town. The farm, and Kevins memory, is filled with the closeness of his large family. Dennis, the oldest brother, drives everyonerather dangerouslyto school. His sisters dance to records in the afternoons. At bedtime, knock-knock jokes flow between the siblings rooms. Kevin has the powerful sense of being born lucky.Soon, however, the farm is lost; the school closed; the family fractured. The familys move from the farm, while not all bad, leaves Kevin yearning for Rollingstone and the old family home. He begins a sometimes self-destructive search for new ways to define himselfin friendship, in art, in wordsthat lasts well into adulthood. And while his losses are still grievous, he begins to see new circuits of possibility and rediscover old sources of strength.Leaving Rollingstone, set in a time of major social change, is a portrait of the inevitability of loss and the power of choice, about how a big-city ad man and novelist reclaimed the enduring values and surprising vitality of his small-town boyhood.
