Winner of the Colorado Book Award When Stacey "Shakespeare" Williams returns to his family's farm in eastern Colorado to bury his dead cat, he finds his widowed and senile father, Emmett, living in squalor. There's no money, the land is fallow, and a local banker has cheated his father out of the majority of the farm equipment and his beloved Cessna. With no job and no prospects, Shakespeare suddenly finds himself caretaker to both his dad and the farm and drawn into an unlikely clique of former classmates: Vaughn Atkins, a paraplegic confined to his mother's basement; Clarissa McPhail, an overweight anorexic who pitches for the local softball team; and longtime bully D.J. Beckman, who now deals drugs in small-town Dorsey. Facing the loss of the farm, Shakespeare hatches a half-serious plot with Emmett and his fellow misfits to rob the very bank that stole their future. Mixing pathos and humor in equal measure, award-winning East of Denver is an "unflinching novel of rural America," a poignant, darkly funny tale about a father and son finding their way together as their livelihood inexorably disappears. It is the first in a loose trilogy of comic yarns set on the high plains of Strattford County, Colorado.