Excerpt from A Doubter's Almanac by Ethan Canin, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

That night, before he went home, he stowed the chain in the trunk of a maple. The maple had been struck by lightning, and inside it was a cavity that he'd smoothed with a rasp, adding a meticulously carved cover piece that he'd cut with a wire saw and blended into the ridges of a burl. He'd carved the screw threads of the cover in reverse, so that even if his hiding place was discovered, his chain would be safe: nobody would think to unscrew a cover backward.

In his mind, this was the end of it. He would no more have shown his parents what he'd made than he would have asked what his father was fixing on the ladder or his mother reading at the table. Once, as a child, he'd come across his mother crying at the back of the kitchen, holding an old newspaper in her hands; but he'd never asked her what had been the matter. Since that day, silence had become their standard. He felt affection for his parents, and he understood that they felt affection for him. But the three of them hardly questioned one another, and they almost never revealed to one another anything of importance.

On the day he finished closing the chain inside the tree, however, he realized that he'd passed a milestone in his life: he'd long wanted to produce something worthy of concealing.

From the book A Doubter's Almanac by Ethan Canin. Copyright © 2016 by Ethan Canin. Reprinted by arrangement with Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.