My first experience as a book buyer came in grade school when I eagerly attended my school’s Scholastic Book Fair where I spent my allowance on paperbacks. In those days, I was interested in sports novels, especially ones that featured underdogs overcoming great odds. Looking back now, I imagine my connection to those underdog stories came from the fact that I grew up in a rural part of southeastern Illinois that was often overlooked as part of the flyover zone.

The only bookstore nearby was part of a hatchery that sold baby chicks. The front part of the hatchery housed used books. I discovered as much when I was in college, and I went to this “bookstore” often to see what new books I could add to my collection. The main business of Double R Hatchery may have been the selling of chicks, but something else had been born inside me—an eternal appreciation of booksellers. One of my greatest pleasures has always been browsing the shelves of any bookstore just to see what might catch my eye.

I know bookstores can’t stock every book that’s published, so I’ve always been thankful for any shelf space they’ve given me over the years. I’ve also valued the many stores that have invited me to do author events, but maybe none so much as an independent bookseller in southern Illinois.

One year, I was signing ARCs of one of my novels at the Winter Institute of the American Booksellers Association, and I was chatting with the people who came to my table. I asked two women where they were from, and they told me they owned a bookstore in Mt. Vernon, Illinois. “I doubt you know where that is,” one of the women said. “You’d be surprised,” I said, and then I told her I grew up only eighty miles north of there. What a delightful meeting of small-town folks! I often think of the way bookstores connect people to one another through the events they host and the books they recommend.

My new novel, The Evening Shades, a companion to my Pulitzer Prize Finalist, The Bright Forever, is part crime novel and part love story set in a small Midwestern town. At the end of The Bright Forever, one of its main characters, Henry Dees, leaves Tower Hill, Indiana, taking with him his secret involvement in a crime. I always wondered where he went and what his life was like. The Evening Shades provides the answer as he rents a room in a stranger’s house in another small Midwestern town. Can love find him in middle age, or will his secret past prevent it? That’s the question at the heart of The Evening Shades, a story of accommodation, resilience, forgiveness, and love in the face of all that threatens the splendor of our ordinary lives.

I tell the stories of the farming communities and small towns of the Midwest because they’re so often overlooked. I tell them because I come from those places, and though it’s been years since I lived there, they’re ingrained in me. I know them better than any place I’ve lived or visited, and I have a special empathy for the people whose voices are often silenced or ignored. I tell these stories because I want to look closely at the complicated lives lived in the Heartland with the hope that readers might know them, too.