Back in 2012 I wrote an article called “My Favorite Book … This Year.” I do track what I read, and I know my reading tastes well enough that I generally end up with a year’s worth of excellent books. They should all be favorites—but there are always some standouts.

The year past is no exception. Man, I read some fabulous books this year, books that made me think or cry or laugh, books that knocked me out with the author’s craftwork, like …

Anne Enright / The Green Road
Ben Fountain / Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
Alexandra Fuller / Leaving Before the Rains Come
Roxane Gay / Bad Feminist
Marilynne Robinson / Lila
Donal Ryan / The Thing About December

I heartily recommend these titles to you.

But you want to know my favorite, so I won’t linger. It’s Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson, and not normally the sort of book I would choose. I’m still a little surprised at myself. But I can tell you what hooked me in the reviews: the protagonist, Pete Snow, a social worker with a thirteen-year-old daughter and a marriage so troubled he tells his wife, “I take kids away from people like us.” That. Right there. One heartbreaking line that hinted at so much story …

And Pete’s problems with his family are only the subplot. He’s got other families to save, too, though (as the EW blurb tells us) he is “covering vast rural areas where the best he can hope for is to bring some aid and comfort to the children of parents who are living on the edge.” The book opens with a scene from a case Pete’s been working for months. Then there’s another one.

Pete gets a call from a local school. An unknown eleven-year-old boy has wandered up; he’s clearly undernourished, nearly feral, wearing strange, homemade clothing. Pete feeds and clothes him and takes him back to the forest where he says he lives. It’s dusk, and they are met with a warning shot and a spotlight.

The boy started to walk toward the light, and Pete was trying to decide if he should reach for him, hold him back—of course not, you’ll be shot—when the man spoke: “Stay right there.” …

“Mr. Pearl? I’m from the Department of Family Service.” His voice sounded high and fearful in his own ears. He carried on and hoped that his timbre would improve: “I’m not law enforcement or anything like that. May I show you my badge?”

The light offered no response.

“I just come across Benjamin in town and he said you all were living up here and so I brought him back.”

The light swept over to the boy.

“Take off those clothes,” the man ordered. Benjamin immediately complied and the light swung back into Pete’s eyes.

“Wait,” Pete said. “It’s gotta be thirty, forty degrees out. There’s nothing wrong with the clothes. They’re new. Look, you’re not on the hook for them. They’re gratis. Free.”

“I know what gratis means.”

“Of course. I just meant that it’s my job. I have a budget for this sort of thing.”

The boy had dropped the coat and the shirt into a pile in front of him and was undoing the pants. An insistent logorrhea poured out of Pete as the kid pulled off a brilliant white T-shirt.

“Look, if it’s a matter of you wanting to not take a handout, that’s fine. I can certainly arrange to, you know, accept payment for the clothes. I, I didn’t mean to offend you or overstep my bounds. Benjamin didn’t ask for the clothes. I insisted that he take them.”

The boy unlaced and kicked off his new boots and tugged off the new socks and then pulled down his pants and stepped out of them onto his wounded bare feet.

“Mr. Pearl. Please. He’s just a boy out here in the cold. I wouldn’t have—”

The light swung over to the boy and then back into Pete’s face and stopped him short. The boy gingerly stepped in place on the pine needles, wincing.

“Please, sir. Mr. Pearl. Your son’s got giardia poisoning from drinking out of the streams up here. I figure you and your family might have it too. I have some medicine right here in my jacket. Enough for all of you and I can bring some more. In fact, I was hoping that you might let me bring up some oranges. He’s got bleeding gums and we think …”

He trailed off. Benjamin was naked. All knobs and knots, white and gaunt, and he put Pete in mind of creatures that lived in caves, albino spiders and eyeless fishes and newts.

It’s pretty bleak stuff, but the milieu (it’s set in 1980 Montana) and the characters are so finely drawn and the plot parceled out in pieces so irresistible, I found myself in the middle of the book, holding my breath, filled with dread—all good stuff, really, in spite of the way it sounds—flipping the pages as quickly as I could read them.

Without, of course, skipping through any of the gorgeous, brilliant writing. It’s Pete’s story, but occasionally Henderson transitions to other points of view, and from past tense to present tense. Pete’s thoughts are in second person, and we follow his daughter’s story from a series of social worker reports. It all works.

Oh, and the ending: Horrifying. Heartbreaking. Perfect. And so it goes.

Fourth of July Creek is a first novel (published 2014), but don’t be misled by that “first.” Henderson’s bio tells us he “was awarded a 2011 PEN Emerging Writers Award in fiction, and a 2011 Philip Roth Residency in Creative Writing at Bucknell University. His short story, ‘Number Stations’ won a Pushcart Prize and a finalist honors for the University of Texas Keene Prize, where he was a Michener Center for Writing Fellow.” Which is to say, he’s been working on his craft for years.

And which is surely why I loved this book enough to call it my favorite of 2015.

Tweet: My favorite book of 2015. Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson.
Tweet: Oh, and the ending: Horrifying. Heartbreaking. Perfect. And so it goes.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the brands, products, or services that I have mentioned. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”