Jacob

In Fallen, David Maine has drawn a convincing, enthralling portrait of a family driven (and riven) by familiar passions and jealousies. The result is a staggering achievement and intimate, hilarious, and utterly original telling of temptation and murder, and of exile and loss.

Nestled among Seattle's skyscrapers, The Zephyr Holdings Building is a bleak rectangle topped by an orange-and-black logo that gives no hint of Zephyr's business. Lack of clarity, it turns out, is Zephyr's defining characteristic. The floors are numbered in reverse. No one has ever seen the CEO or glimpsed his office on the first (i.e., top) floor. Yet every day people clip on their ID tags, file into the building, sit at their desks, and hope that they're not about to be outsourced.