Welcome to Grouse County, somewhere in the Midwest, where the towns are small but the people, their dreams and their eccentricities come in all sizes.

When Sheriff Dan Norman arrests local troublemaker Tiny Darling for vandalising an anti-vandalism dance, he does not expect much in the way of fallout. But unseen wheels have been set in motion, and lives will be changed: Dan finds love, Tiny loses his wife Louise, and all three travel an epic journey of the heart.

The End of Vandalism is full of small miracles of observation, compassion and humour, held together by the 'electric deadpan' of Drury's celebrated style. For readers willing to tune in, the experience will be a revelatio

A thief vacuums the church before stealing the chalice....A lonely woman paints her toenails in a drafty farmhouse....A sleepless man watches his restless bride scatter their bills beneath the stars....Welcome to Grouse County....
"Tom Drury's loving, wryly intelligent take on Grouse County is at once sophisticated and compassionate. Drury's prose is quietly heartbreaking, laugh-out-loud funny, and always, absolutely convincing. The End of Vandalism marks the beginning of a distinguished American career."
--Jayne Anne Phillips
"Remarkable...Every so often a debut novel appears that simply stuns you with the elegance and beauty of its writing....A+"
--Entertainment Weekly
"So amiably dense with anecdote and observation, the reader is bounced along by its energy....Grouse County is unabashedly American, a setting both nostalgic and wittily contemporary....In a sense, the main character is the county itself, with its eccentricities, rituals, quarrels and comforts."
--The Boston Sunday Globe
"Brilliant, wonderfully funny...It's hard to think of any novel--let alone a first novel--in which you can hear the people so well. This is indeed deadpan humor, and Tom Drury is its master."
--Annie Dillard
"Rich and readable...[Drury] possesses his made-up world with the same authority Sherwood Anderson brought to Winesburg, Ohio, and Faulkner to Yoknapatawpha County....The many characters who walk their separate paths end up weaving each other inside a mysterious pattern, in which they themselves are also caught."
--USA Today
Chosen by New York magazine and Publishers Weekly as
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 1994

"Drury is a truly great writer."--Esquire "A beguiling novel . . . perceptive and captivating."--The New York Times "Startling and utterly original."--Newsday In this mesmerizing novel, Tom Drury once again journeys to the quiet Midwest to spend an action-packed October weekend in the lives of a precarious family whose members all want something without knowing how to get it: for Charles, an heirloom shotgun; for his wife, Joan, the imaginative life she once knew; for their young son, Micah, a knowledge of the scope and reliability of his world, aided by prowling the empty town at night; and for Joan's daughter, Lyris, a stable foot from which to begin to grow up. Sometimes together, sometimes crucially apart, father, mother, son, and daughter move through a series of vivid encounters that demonstrate how even the most provisional family can endure in its own particular way.

Set in the remote, beautiful region of the American Midwest that gives the novel its title, The Driftless Area tells the story of Pierre Hunter, a young bartender with unfailing optimism, a fondness for coin tricks, and an uncanny capacity for finding trouble. When he falls in love with the mysterious and isolated Stella Rosmarin, Pierre becomes the central player in a revenge drama he must unravel and bring to its shocking conclusion. Along the way he will liberate $77,000 from a murderous thief, summon the resources that have eluded him all his life, and come to question the very meaning of chance and mortality.

The new novel from the award-winning author of The End of Vandalism is a wry and sophisticated heist drama. Set in the rugged region of the Midwest that gives the novel its title, The Driftless Area is the story of Pierre Hunter, a young bartender with unfailing optimism, a fondness for coin tricks, and an uncanny capacity for finding trouble. When he falls in love, with the mysterious and isolated Stella Rosmarin, Pierre becomes the central player in a revenge drama he must unravel and bring to its shocking conclusion. Along the way he will liberate $77,000 from a murderous thief, summon the resources that have eluded him all his life, and come to question the very meaning of chance and mortality. For nothing is as it seems in The Driftless Area. Identities shift, violent secrets lie in wait, the future can cause the past, and love becomes a mission that can take you beyond this world. In its tender, cool irony, The Driftless Area recalls the best of neonoir, and its cast of bona fide small-town eccentrics adrift in the American Midwest make for a clever and deeply pleasurable read from one of our most beloved authors.

"Reading "Pacific" makes me once again fall in love with Drury's words, and his perception of a world that is full of dangers and passions and mysteries and graces."--Yiyun Li
In "Pacific," Tom Drury revisits the community of Grouse County, the setting of his landmark debut, "The End of Vandalism." When fourteen-year-old Micah Darling travels to Los Angeles to reunite with the mother who abandoned him seven years ago, he finds himself out of his league in a land of magical freedom. Back in the Midwest, an ethereal young woman comes to Stone City on a mission that will unsettle the lives of everyone she meets--including Micah's half-sister, Lyris, and his father, Tiny, a petty thief. An investigation into the stranger's identity uncovers a darkly disturbed life, as parallel narratives of the comic and tragic, the mysterious and quotidian, unfold in both the country and the city.

An utterly original and compelling novel from "one of our living masters ("McSweeney's"), originally published in 1998 and now re-issued by Grove with a new introduction--a conversation between the author and Daniel Handler.
Paul Emmons has his faults--envy, lust, naivete, money laundering, and art forgery to name but a few. A fallen accountant and scamster, Emmons and wife Mary are exiled abroad, though they enjoy frequent and inadvisable returns to New England, the region of his crimes, to check in on the property they own but cannot claim.
With this, the stage is set for Drury's darkly comic novel of love, death, guilt, redemption, and the various forms of clam chowder. Through a series of flashbacks and bizarre encounters, we see Paul's life as a college student in Quebec; his unfortunate professional beginnings in Rhode Island as business associate of Carlo Record, the one-armed president of the fraudulent company "New England Amusements"; and his stint as an investigative journalist.
As time passes, Paul is tracked down by Carlo's cronies--Ashtray Bob, Line-Item Vito, and Hatpin Henry--who try to coerce Paul into stealing the infamous John Singer Sargant painting "The Black Brook" from the Tate gallery in London. Instead, Paul begs Mary, a painter, to reproduce the Sargant, in an attempt to outwit Carlo and his henchmen; a plot that produces comic consequences.
Through it all Paul strives to find and accomplish his mission in life, and myriad characters contrive to tell their stories--of broken promises, nightmarish evenings, and identities lost and found in this "irresistibly droll portrayal of an All-American liar, loser, and innocent" ("Kirkus").