The Fifty-Minute Man

Dan has spent nineteen years in a counseling office at the edge of a Louisville airfield, where the police helicopter cuts between the runways and the window over his desk hums in its frame. His dog, Jack, has slept through roughly eleven thousand sessions on the rug and still wakes at exactly the right moment. Dan has nine minutes between clients. He uses them the way he always does.

Then Raymond and Lorna arrive—married twenty-six years, "Communication" written on the intake form in his handwriting, including her date of birth—and the year begins. Told session by session, with the clock running, The Fifty-Minute Man is a novel about the room where people say what they cannot say anywhere else, and about the man who listens for a living and is still learning to hear.