Buckeye
Patrick Ryan, a longtime editor at One Story and the author of several earlier works of fiction, sets Buckeye in Ohio and follows the long arc of a single family. The novel moves across decades and points of view, tracing what gets passed down between parents and children and what gets pushed under the surface instead. Ryan is known for warm, observant short stories, and he carries that sensibility into a longer form here. The book is less interested in big external events than in the smaller turning points of ordinary lives, including marriages, careers, disappointments, and quiet reconciliations. It belongs on the shelf with other contemporary midwestern family novels that take their characters seriously without making them too clever or too tragic.
What you might want to know about Buckeye
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A novel about an Ohio family whose long shared history is reshaped by the things they never quite said out loud.
It spans years and viewpoints but is more an extended family portrait than a wide historical saga.
It shares his sensibility but stands as a separate novel.
Buckeye was written by Patrick Ryan, published in 2025 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
Buckeye is 464 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Buckeye takes most readers 7 to 10 hours to finish.
Buckeye is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.