Young German immigrant Erik Schroder invents an identity around which he fashions an imaginary life. During a custody dispute, he flees to New England with his young daughter, Meadow, taking her on an ill-advised road trip and making a series of poor decisions. A multilayered novel about transformation and acknowledging one's own painful truth, Schroder is narrated by a flawed but profoundly human protagonist. — Amy Palmer
“This deeply layered novel about an embattled father reclaiming his only joy drew me in with the intense beauty of its language and the doomed journey of its unreliable narrator. In Erik Schroder, Gaige gives us a character who should repel but whom I loved for his humanity and the way he expressed his love for his daughter and she, her love for him. Schroder takes the reader into the arrested heart of a foreigner whose need to appear American is ultimately his undoing. That we care about him is a testament to Gaige's skill and compassion.”
— Vicki DeArmon, Copperfield's Books, Sebastopol, CA