If I could tell you only one thing about my life it would be this: when I was seven years old the mailman ran over my head. As formative events go, nothing else comes close; my careening, zigzag existence, my wounded brain and faith in God, my collisions with joy and affliction, all of it has come, in one way or another, out of that moment on a summer morning when the left rear tire of a United States postal jeep ground my tiny head into the hot gravel of the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation.

With these words Edgar Mint, half-Apache and mostly orphaned, makes his unshakable claim on our attention. In the course of Brady Udall’s high-spirited, inexhaustibly inventive novel, Edgar survives not just this bizarre accident, but a hellish boarding school for Native American orphans, a well-meaning but wildly dysfunctional Mormon foster-family, and the loss of most of the illusions that are supposed to make life bearable.

What persists is Edgar’s innate goodness, his belief in the redeeming power of language, and his determination to find and forgive the man who almost killed him. The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint is a miracle of storytelling, bursting with heartache and hilarity and inhabited by characters as outsized as the landscape of the American West.

“Marvelous . . . Edgar Mint is nobody’s Everyman, but he is the hope and the pain of a child looking for, and eventually finding, a home.” –Los Angeles Times

“Profound and stirring . . . brilliantly executed.” –The Wall Street Journal

 
Brady Udall is the author of the much-acclaimed story collection Letting Loose the Hounds. Born and raised in the Indian country of northeastern Arizona, Udall now teaches at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania, where he lives with his wife and two sons.