Set in rural Kansas, Catherine Browder’s The Manning Girl explores the redemptive power of parenting and community. Tyler Manning’s life is transformed when a young mother leaves his own younger brother’s baby at his doorstep. Tyler is of Free State Kansas stock, sturdy and deliberate, a meticulously organized industrial arts teacher who can make anything. Suddenly he must make a family. Uncle Tyler becomes Delia May’s legal father, and a model caretaker. But beneath this tale of domestic striving is secrecy and strife, anger and resentment, the looming presence of back story. Browder contrasts a family’s difficult past with a peaceful and hard-won present. The Manning Girl, heartwarming and wise, shows us that what we care about most can be made: hope, family, love, a bright future.
- Thomas Fox Averill, author of Found Documents from the Life of Nell Johnson Doerr

“Without that surge of mystery energy,” muses a neighbor in this wise and moving novel, “no child would ever survive.” Nor would any novel. Fortunately, there are frequent surges of mystery energy propelling The Manning Girl and guiding the book’s title character from swaddling clothes to wedding gown. Here is a compelling coming-of-age story, not just for the girl, but equally for the bewildered bachelor uncle who raises her. A beautiful book.
- Roderick Townley, author of The Great Good Thing trilogy

1992. Tyler Manning— high school teacher, part-time farmer, bachelor of 38—is planning his first day of summer vacation when a strange car approaches his Kansas farmhouse. By the time the battered Ford departs, Tyler is holding a three-week-old infant. The baby’s father is his estranged brother. Woven throughout the narrative of May Manning’s upbringing—assisted by long-time neighbors and school colleagues—is the parallel story of Tyler and his younger brother, the charming but deceitful Mickey Manning. The possibility of Mickey’s return haunts Tyler throughout May’s childhood. When Mickey does reappear, he brings unexpected danger into their lives. The Manning Girl reimagines George Eliot’s 1860 fable, Silas Marner, and places it in a contemporary Midwestern frame, following the girl and her uncle/father from May’s unexpected arrival to her 21st year. The Manning Girl explores, with tenderness and humor, the unique situation of a single father, supported by a surprising community.

Catherine Browder’s most recent book, Resurrection City, a story cycle about the Great East Japan Disaster of 2011, received the Spokane Prize and is forthcoming from Willow Springs Books. She is the author of three previous story collections, a Ploughshares Solo, numerous award-winning and anthologized stories, and produced plays. An NEA and the Missouri Arts Council fiction fellow, The Manning Girl is her first novel. She lives in Kansas City, Missouri.