A woman struggles to discern the meaning of life when she is taken as a POW in Vietnam where she learns to train rats. Disguised as a master's thesis, this novel pushes not only the boundaries of genre but those of humanity and faith as well.

Young Hyrum Thayne, an unrefined geological surveyor, steals a massive dictionary out of the Grand County library in a midnight raid, startling the good people of Moab into believing a nefarious band of Book of Mormon thugs, the Gadianton Robbers, has arisen again. To make matters worse, Hyrum's illicit affair with Dora Tanner, a local poet thought to be mad, results in the delivery of a bouncing baby boy who vanishes the night of his birth. Righteous...

"Mormonism begins with a memoir: Joseph Smith kneeling in a grove until the Father and Son appear and promise him a quixotic religious renown. Since then, the faith Smith birthed has raised up memoirs as gritty as Parley P. Pratt's or as luminously sarcastic as Elna Baker's. Grafted somewhere into those comes this boyhood memoir, rooted not in Mormonism but in the Protestantism of American suburbia and the Jesus Freak movement of the early 1970s,...

Cheerful in the face of dark opposition. Innovative to improve a backward world. Industrial as a cure for oppressive conditions. Unyielding beneath all who seek to bind and control them. Faithful until they conquer the fear of death and rise to great acts of heroism and service. Mormons and Steampunks are two faces of the same coin. Twelve authors spin tales of true believers facing impossible odds, risking this life in the hope of gaining something...