Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home

Grant recounts his mid-pandemic stint as a rural mail carrier in this good-natured memoir. In 2020, a 50-year-old Grant was sitting in a North Carolina airport when he was laid off, over the phone, from his job as a consumer strategist. Given the rise of Covid and his recent diagnosis with prostate cancer, he returned to his Virginia hometown and applied for a spate of jobs that offered health insurance. His only promising lead was with the USPS Rural Carrier team, so he entered their training program, where he quickly learned that the job involved a minefield of logistics and a mind-boggling number of packages. The bulk of the narrative follows the folksy day-to-day routine of Grant’s new gig: he navigated muddy Virginia back roads, accidentally plunged his hand into a hornet’s nest, and kept an eye out for the people on his route, all while consuming a steady stream of Slim Jims (the mail carrier’s preferred snack). With good humor and plainspoken prose, Grant illustrates how the work helped him feel useful to a town he’d left behind and reignited his sense of vitality. This has charm to spare. Agent: David Granger, Aevitas Creative Management. (July)