One Hundred Miles from Manhattan

Chris Orcutt builds an ensemble novel around a fictional Hudson Valley enclave where wealthy residents, their service workers, and a few outsiders orbit each other through ten alternating narrators covering a year told out of order. The ambition is real — the structure illuminates how privilege looks different depending on where you stand in a community — and the individual voices hold up across diverse chapters. Named one of IndieReader's Best Indie Books of 2014. The cautions are worth naming: adultery, lust, and personal destruction run through several storylines, making this adult reading in orientation even if not graphically explicit. As an indie title it also carries limited critical footprint, which makes it harder to assess fully. Patient readers drawn to literary character studies of wealth and illusion will find it rewarding; readers wanting clean fiction or a conventional plot will want to look elsewhere.