Michael Byers Selected Works

This wise and richly symphonic first novel by the award-winning author of The Coast of Good Intentions is a thoroughly contemporary family drama that hinges on a riveting medical dilemma. Dr. Henry Moss, a dedicated geneticist, happens upon a possible cure for a disease that causes rapid aging and early death in children. His discovery may hold the key to eternal youth, but exploiting it is an ethical minefield. Henry must make a painful choice: he can save the life of a critically ill boy he has grown to love—at the cost of his career—or he can sell his discovery for a fortune to match the wealth of his dot-com-rich Seattle neighbors. For help Henry turns to his close-knit family, and in their intimately detailed lives a story blossoms of unforgettable characters grappling with their own demons. Henry's wryly intelligent wife, Ilse, longs to rediscover some passion as she faces middle age and languishes in a dead-end job. Their daughter, a high school basketball star, suffers setbacks and the pangs of early love, while their sweet, hapless son drifts into adolescence. These utterly real characters inhabit a story that, in Elizabeth Berg"s words, "will move you to tears and make you laugh out loud. It will also probably make you lie in bed at night and think about things that should be thought about: medical ethics, the moral choices of everyday life, the meaning of friendship and love and compassion, the need for connection."

A novel of ambition and obsession centered on the race to discover Pluto in 1930, pitting an untrained Kansas farm boy against the greatest minds of Harvard at the run-down Lowell Observatory in Arizona In 1928, the boy who will discover Pluto, Clyde Tombaugh, is on the family farm, grinding a lens for his own telescope under the immense Kansas sky. In Flagstaff, Arizona, the staff of Lowell Observatory is about to resume the late Percival Lowell's interrupted search for Planet X. Meanwhile, the immensely rich heir to a chemical fortune has decided to go west to hunt for dinosaurs and in Cambridge, Massachussetts, the most beautiful girl in America is going slowly insane while her ex-heavyweight champion boyfriend stands by helplessly, desperate to do anything to keep her. Inspired by the true story of Tombaugh and set in the last gin-soaked months of the flapper era, Percival's Planet tells the story of the intertwining lives of half a dozen dreamers, schemers, and madmen. Following Tombaugh's unlikely path from son of a farmer to discoverer of a planet, the novel touches on insanity, mathematics, music, astrophysics, boxing, dinosaur hunting, shipwrecks—and what happens when the greatest romance of your life is also the source of your life's greatest sorrow.

A promising cinema director in his long-lost youth, Hollywood mogul Gary Rivoli now finds himself at the helm of his 33rd low-budget horror flick, The Broken Man. But number 33 is posing a problem: he seems to have hired a real-life witch to build his new monster—or at least there’s something decidedly creepy about Alice White, about the new creature as it comes into being, and about Gary’s beautiful life as it slides horribly, and terrifyingly, away from him. How long can he survive in a monster movie come to life—and at what cost?

This dazzling debut collection from a Seattle native features stories evocatively set along the Northwest coast, stories of quiet but astonishing lives. Here are ferry workers, carpenters, park rangers, living alongside crab factories, cranberry bogs, the misty ocean. Here are people puzzled by the processes of growing up, leaving home, parenting, aging. Here are people who realize there are second chances, that from illness can come hope, that from family can come a greater sense of self. Psychologically complex and glowing with warmth, these rich stories recall Tobias Wolff and Raymond Carver.