In The Beforeland a boys desperate act of rebellion against his grandmother reverberates outward causing rifts and reckonings in the lives of others a man fleeing his own troubled family who becomes the grandsons unwitting accomplice a poet struggling with the limitations of language and his wifes distance the proprietor of a dying motel and the grandmother herself who finds love for the first time as she recuperates from her injury. Set in the Mojave Desert and the suburbs of Southern Californi