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It doesn't amaze me that some bad books sell a lot of copies; after all, we live in a country in which millions and millions of people can be persuaded that So You Think You Can Dance is entertaining, and that Jennifer Aniston is an attractive woman. What does amaze me is that there are books, great books, that somehow don't find a readership, that don't get the attention they deserve. I just reviewed one of these for the Washington Post. I said a lot of nice things, and then sat back and waited for the sales to skyrocket. It may speak to my skills as a reviewer that they haven't, but I was certainly not alone in piling praise on the book, so I think it must be something else.

The book is Jon Clinch's Kings of the Earth, and to miss out on reading it is to miss one of the best and most moving novels of the year. It is beautifully written, it fascinates on every page, and it tells a story that resonates in the mind and in the heart long after the last page has been turned.

Clinch is the author of Finn, published several years ago to great acclaim, and Kings also draws its inspiration from an established source — a real crime that happened in a lonely tiny town in upstate New York — John Gardner country — almost 20 years ago. The story of the Ward brothers, eccentric, semi-literate, filthy and feared, was the subject of the documentary Brother's Keeper, a film that was ultimately more condescending than compassionate. Clinch covers the same story — the death of one of the brothers and the accusation that another had, in fact, strangled him while he slept in the bed they all shared, and turns it into a broad tapestry of the particularly American heart — indomitable, eloquent without being prissy, kind but practical. The story is told in a collage of voices — the voices of the brothers and their sister, their relatives, particularly their drug-dealing nephew, the cops and lawyers and, in especially moving passages, their dead mother and father.

It is, like Philipp Meyer's great American Rust, about moral ambiguities, about how we as a people, whatever our schemes and devious inventions, try to do the right thing, to grow toward goodness as plants seek the light.

Kings of the Earth is the literary equivalent of Springsteen's Nebraska, also largely overlooked when it came out, an album that has come to seem the pinnacle of Springsteen's powers to delineate and illuminate the lives of ordinary people. There is a song on the album about a highway patrolman who is faced with the dilemma of arresting his brother or following him to the Canadian border and letting him go free, a song about love in its purest form, love which seeks to find expression even in the midst of a deeply conflicted moral crisis. "I catch him strayin' like any brother would/ Man turns his back on his family he just ain't no good."

Clinch's book is that song. The language is beautiful but colloquial, the story complex but eminently readable; it raises big questions, and it answers them in a way that shines a light not just on the characters who live in this book, but the men and women who live next door to us, who live, in fact, in our own houses.

And, just to tell you something extra cool: Springsteen's father was Clinch's wife's school-bus driver when she was a little girl.

People use the word dark now to describe books, as though darkness were something to be avoided, as though literature were meant to be empowering and happy all the time. Darkness, for Clinch, for the best literature, is inevitable, but it is only from the American darkness that we find, with courage and compassion, our way into the American light.

Unlike many of its more glitzy competitors this summer, Kings of the Earth will be relevant and read for years to come and, to return the overwhelming kindness shown to me by the readers at Powell's, I can only give this one passionate piece of advice: Read. It. Now.

And, if you don't believe me, ask Oprah. She picked it as one of the 10 best reads for the summer. Oprah is a pretty smart woman, and her reviewer, Taylor Antrim, gets the immense virtues of this stunning novel exactly right. The summer's almost over. Don't let us down.

[Editor's Note: Click here to read an exclusive essay for Powells.com by Jon

[Editor's Note: Read the Powells.com interview with Robert Goolrick.]

At one point during the course of A Reliable Wife, the heroine thinks, "Men only give you what they give you when they know they can't give you what you want." This thought, so compelling and pointed, was not invented by me. It was said to me 20 years ago by a friend, during the course of a hapless affair she was having with a movie star who had given her a diamond bracelet instead of the divorce he had promised.

I am always grateful for the small moments that linger in the memory; for the chance remark, for a random sighting of a child taking her father's hand on the bus and putting her head against his chest, for things seen and heard and lived through. For the inexplicable, magical ordinariness of everyday life.

Novels are made up out of scraps such as these, some big, some little. They are made out of everything the writer has gleaned from experience. Passion recollected in tranquility.

People are more clever and more touching than they imagine, and, as a writer, I am their diarist, their scavenger.

In the case of this book, apart from the thousand bits and pieces seen or heard, there are two profound influences, completely different from each other, each a fire in my brain. One began as a doctoral dissertation and turned into a book I first read 35 years ago; the other is a children's book, something casually read 50 years ago, but never forgotten.

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When I was about 10, my sister was given a wonderful book for her birthday, one that I loved, I think, more than my sister did. It was called The Park That Spring Forgot, and it was by Winifred Welles, published in 1940. In it, there's a park that mysteriously fails to turn green and lush one ordinary spring. On a recent re-reading, I realized that the unnamed park is, in fact, Sheridan Square in New York City's Greenwich Village, and one of the houses drawn in the beautiful illustrations is the one in which my friends, the Nadins, now live with my sweet goddaughter, Anna Page.

Thus the writing of The Reliable Wife began with the idea of a miracle in a garden, and the rest of the novel is built to create that miracle. I realize now that the idea for it came 50 years ago, from Welles's book, and, like the park, it lay dormant until a miracle of my own occurred.

The dissertation that became a book is by Michael Lesy, and it was first published 35 years ago as Wisconsin Death Trip.

"The pictures you're about to see are of people who were once actually alive." That's the way Lesy's book begins. And it never lets up.

I was set on fire when I read it. Lesy's collage of words and pictures paint a haunting, cinematic portrait of a small town in Wisconsin at the diseased end of the 19th century. I had been taught to imagine 19th-century cities to be teeming with moral turpitude and industrial madness, and rural America to be sleeping in a prosperous innocence, filled with honest and industrious people. Not so. Lesy unlocks the Pandora's box of country life to show us its dark and ravaged soul.

The portrait he paints has never left me, and certainly it had a profound influence on the structure and genesis of The Reliable Wife. I set the story in Lesy country, frozen Wisconsin in the dead of winter, and played out a complex entangling of three lives against his starkly compelling canvas.

I owe a great deal to Michael Lesy, to his explication of the awful life endured by the mass of people caught between machinery and madness. Read Lesy's book. It will never leave you. It left me changed forever.

And so it began, a secret garden and three figures in a frozen, barren landscape, like a pure blank canvas, waiting for the first drop of crimson to