Books
OUR POSSIBLE LIFE
Forthcoming March 2027
Six interlinked stories, illuminating the fragile-yet-resilient ties that bind family, friends, and lovers.
A master of American realism and of the short story, Andre Dubus III here explores what poet Ellen Bass calls “this visceral bloody union that is love, but beyond love.” Set along the border between Massachusetts and New Hampshire, Our Possible Life follows the stories of six characters, three women and three men, all of whom are trying to live up to what they believe their lives should be. A disillusioned young wife reports her insurrectionist husband to the FBI; a former debt-collector for a bookie is trapped in the neighborhood he used to terrorize; a divorced father, a middle-aged travelling nurse struggles to escape the gravitational pull of her charismatic, self-involved swinger of an ex-husband; married couples who have become strangers to one another, who strive to forgive each other, and to give their children what they didn’t have themselves.
With consummate grace, Our Possible Life delves into the myriad challenges of loving and aging, of emotional debt and obligation, of trespass and healing generosity in a fallen world still rich with opportunities to care.
Hardcover: 288 pages
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (March 9, 2027)
Praise for Our Possible Life
"Andre Dubus III is the laureate of the miraculous ordinary. In this collection, he rescues the possible from the edge where the impossible looms.”
- Colum McCann, National Book Award–winning author
"These are deeply immersive stories marked by a spellbinding emotional intensity. Open this book and you will find it inescapable.”
- David Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars
"Andre Dubus III writes stories that pierce the insulation of the everyday, leaving us beautifully exposed to the real stakes of our shared lives—pasts, presents, and futures—and the evergreen possibility of forgiveness and repair. With humor, precision, and unsparing compassion for his people, Dubus finds a thousand ways to dramatize the audacity of love, its terrifying risks and its transformative power, its demands and derangements. Dubus III is an expert cartographer of human interiors and the worlds where two lovers overlap, the heavens and the hells we people make for ourselves here, together and alone. These stories will haunt anyone lucky enough to read and reread them, as I plan to do, for the rest of my own lives."
- Karen Russell, Finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize