"Bowring offers endless, rich details about life in Dalton, making a satisfying story of each chapter, expanding the emotional history of the place, yielding great depths of pain behind small, daily gestures of human connection...An impressive debut bursting with detail and love for the town it brings to life." Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

A luminous new novel of small-town America, The Road to Dalton offers valuable understandings of what it means to be alive in the world: of pain and joy, conflict and love, and the endurance that comes from living.

In the final weeks of 1989, a fender-bender breaks the silence on an icy dark road outside Dalton, Maine, setting in motion events that will ripple throughout the town in ways no one can foresee. When the consequences of the accident play out, the community is left reeling-lives are left bare, and we are reminded that no one is precisely who we think they are.

"Readers will get swept away...and will wish that Bowring isn't done with Dalton and a sequel may be in the works. That's how powerful her writing is." Zachary Houle, Medium

"An auspicious debut. Shannon Bowring is operating in Richard Russo and Anne Tyler territory." Bill Wolfe, Read Her Like an Open Book

"The Road to Dalton locates the miraculous in the mundane, then holds it up, glimmering, for the reader to see." Ron Currie, Jr., author of Everything Matters