Everything We Could Do

After a decade of miscarriages, Brooke Jensen is finally pregnant—with quadruplets. When she goes into labor after twenty-three weeks, Brooke and her husband rush to the hospital in the small town of Hanover, Wisconsin. For the 203 days that follow, they’re plunged into the terrifying and mysterious netherworld of the neonatal intensive care unit.

As the babies grow and struggle, fall turns to stark upper-Midwest winter. Brooke bonds with Dash, a senior nurse whose son, Landon, had been a patient in the NICU years earlier and is now straining his parents’ abilities to care for him. Both families bend and edge closer to breaking, and the questions mount: What does love look like? What does it mean to save a life?

A fiercely honest portrait of American parenthood, the American healthcare system, and Rust Belt communities, Everything We Could Do lays bare the ways that families are formed and remade in times of crisis.

Praise for Everything We Could Do

“This stunning debut is a beautiful and riveting portrait of parents living through heart-wrenching life experiences that offer no easy answers. The two women at the center of the book are so fully imagined that I read the book as tirelessly as I would have read an account of the travails of dear friends. Full of the pain, the pride, the fear, and the love that every parent knows, Everything We Could Do is a gorgeous novel from a writer destined for a major career.” —Ann Packer, author of The Children’s Crusade  

“Everything We Could Do shows us parental love in all its fierce, raw, at times irrational, all-consuming power. McGlynn shows us the fragility as well as the tenaciousness of life from its first moments, the omnipresence of joy alongside fear and grief. This is a meticulously well-researched, beautifully written novel and one of the most poignant portrayals of redemption I have ever read.” —Margot Singer, author of Underground Fugue

“David McGlynn writes about the deep things—love and connection and survival—and he brings beauty and peril into his narrative. His is a wonderful new voice in the literary landscape.” —Roxana Robinson, author of Leaving

“Through his characters’ experiences as parents or nurses in the NICU, David McGlynn explores the deepest topics—parenthood, mortality, love with tenderness, precision and fierceness. The characters are some of the most vivid and layered I’ve read, as they struggle with the power and powerlessness of parenthood. Everything We Could Do is a brave and unforgettable novel.” —Karen E. Bender, author of The Words of Dr. L: Stories

David McGlynn’s previous books include the memoirs One Day You’ll Thank Me and A Door in the Ocean, and the story collection, The End of the Straight and Narrow. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The American Scholar. He teaches at Lawrence University and lives in Madison, Wisconsin.