Drive through the newest subdivisions of Atlanta, Dallas, or Denver, and you’ll notice an unusual similarity in the layout of the houses, the models of the cars, the pastimes of the stay-at-home moms. But this is not your grandparents’ suburbia, "the little houses made of ticky-tacky"—these houses go for half a million dollars and up, and no one stays longer than three or four years. You have entered the land of Relos, the mid-level executives for a growing number of American companies, whose livelihoods depend on their willingness to uproot their families in pursuit of professional success. Together they constitute a new social class, well-off but insecure, well traveled but insular.   

Peter T. Kilborn, a longtime reporter for The New York Times, takes us inside the lives of American Relos, showing how their distinctive pressures and values affect not only their own families and communities but also the country as a whole. As Relo culture becomes the norm for these workers, more and more Americans—no matter their jobs or the economy’s booms and busts—will call Relovilles "home."

"Writing in the tradition of William Whyte’s The Organization Man and Robert and Helen Lynd’s Middletown, Peter Kilborn has produced an insightful study of an aspect of American life that is at once familiar and startling. Next Stop, Reloville combines first-rate storytelling and sharp analysis into a book that is a must-read for anyone interested in what makes this country—and its many restless workers—tick."—Daniel H. Pink, author of A Whole New Mind and Free Agent Nation

"A fascinating account of a new type of transient worker in America, affluent in their material lives but impoverished in their community ties. With detailed personal stories, Peter Kilborn shows how their temporary jobs and temporary homes shape their marriage, childrearing, and community mores."—Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage

"Next Stop, Reloville is massively researched and well digested, but more than this, it interprets a phenomenon that not only goes to the heart of the American Dream but to the heart of human identity. The couples and shakers profiled, from Alpharetta, Georgia, to Castle Rock, Colorado, are in a kind of driven fog. They are each wondering, Who am I, and how did I get on this everlasting treadmill? In this sympathetic and arresting portrait of America’s corporate gypsies, Kilborn takes the Willy Lomans of the present age and weeps for them."—Rev. Paul F. M. Zahl, author of Grace in Practice: A Theology of Everyday Life

"A solid update on the American rat race . . . [Kilborn] clearly evokes the rootlessness of [Relo] lives, with fathers often on the road; mothers at a loss without intimate female friends and struggling to integrate themselves and their children into new communities; and everyone anxious about when the next transfer will come."—Kirkus Reviews

"A skillful storyteller, Kilborn captures the costs and loneliness of the relo lifestyle."—Publishers Weekly