After 20 years Max Binder is still in love with his fiery wife, Maggie, and is determined to get her the perfect fortieth birthday gift. But Max's singular desire - to make his wife happy - leads to an unexpected event that changes the course of his family's life and touches the people who make up their western prairie city.

Set over the course of a single year, Once More With Feeling tells the story of a community through intersecting moments and interconnected lives. The colorful citizens who make up this city - bisected by railway lines and rivers, connected by boulevards and back alleys - are marked by transformation, upheaval, and loss: the worker at a downtown soup kitchen who recognizes a kindred spirit amongst the homeless; the aging sisters who everywhere see the fleeting ghosts of two missing neighborhood children; a communal voice of mothers anxious for the future of their children in the discomfiting world they inhabit - this place of memory, amnesia, longing, and belonging.

Featuring a cast of eclectic characters, Once More With Feeling is about a community, about a family, and about the way time makes fond fools of us all. Award-winning author Méira Cook has crafted a novel that is at once funny, poignant, and yes, full of feeling.