A Job You Mostly Won’t Know How to Do
“About how heartbreaking tragedy can actually burnish us to a new shine we never could have imagined.”
Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author
An Amazon Best Book of the Month selection
For young couple Taz and Marnie, their fixer-upper is the symbol of their new life together: a work in progress, the beginning of something grand, all the more so when they learn that a baby is on the way. But the blueprint for the perfect life eludes Taz when Marnie dies in childbirth, plummeting the taciturn carpenter headfirst into the new, strange world of fatherhood alone, a landscape of contradictions, of great joy and sorrow.
With a supporting cast as rich and compelling as the wild Montana landscape, the novel follows Taz’s first two years as a father—a job no one can be fully prepared for.
With more than eleven books in over twenty years, including the classic Indian Creek Chronicles, Pete Fromm has become one of the West’s best literary legends. A Job You Mostly Won’t Know How to Do beautifully captures people who end up building a life that is both unexpected and brave.
“About how heartbreaking tragedy can actually burnish us to a new shine we never could have imagined.”
Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author
“A beautiful story about what happens when your village comes to the rescue and gives you a second chance at happiness.”
BookPage
“Simply magical as Fromm renders indelible images with heartbreaking precision in beautiful, lyrical prose.”
Booklist
“Pulls at the heart strings…Full of gorgeous descriptions of the wild landscape of Montana…Fans of emotional family dramas will find much to love.”
Publishers Weekly
“A compassionate and unsentimental look at one confused young man’s path through loss.”
Kirkus Reviews
“A Job You Mostly Won’t Know How to Do reminds us of the light, the goodness of people, the kindness of strangers, and how the unlucky aren’t always lost. They can be lucky again. Fromm is an important and much-needed writer. I can’t recommend this one enough.”
Willy Vlautin, author of Don’t Skip Out on Me
“Once again, Fromm writes masterfully about the tribulations of everyday people in the modern American West. A Job You Mostly Won’t Know How to Do is at once a heart-wrenching love story, a gritty tale of surviving irredeemable loss, and a poignant meditation on fatherhood.”
Jonathan Evison, author of Lawn Boy
“Fromm is an artist, sifting through all the detail of the daily world to find the beautiful revealed. His characters are another life you’ve lived, felt that closely. Taz is overwhelmed in this novel but also enriched. The miracle of hanging a door correctly, of making it through the first year without his daughter’s mother, of getting through a single day, finding resilience and a more expansive life than tragedy promised. There are no shortcuts here, everything earned.”
David Vann, author of Aquarium
Stephen Graybill is an actor, producer, and award-winning voice-over artist. He was seen on television in The Girls Guide to Depravity, Law & Order: SVU, Law & Order, and HBO’s The Wire. He has also acted on stage and done voice-overs for commercials, winning both a Gold Clio Award and a Silver Effie Award. He has also worked on over fifty audiobooks, including Jesus Swagger by Jarrid Wilson.