The Removers

Book excerpt: "A literature professor, ... Andrew Meredith's father was fired after unspecified allegations of sexual misconduct. It's a transgression [he] cannot forgive, for it brought about long-lasting familial despair ... [He] treads water, stuck in a kind of suspended adolescence--falling in and out of school, moving blindly from one half-hearted relationship to the next ... Broke, Andrew moves back home to his childhood neighborhood ... and takes a job alongside his father as a 'remover,' the name for those unseen, unsung workers who take away the bodies of those who die at home ... [and] begins to see his father not through the lens of a wronged and resentful child, but as a sympathetic, imperfect man who loves his family despite his flaws"--