Pacific (Grove Press)
Tom Drury’s depictions of the stark beauty of the Midwest and the futility of American wanderlust have earned him comparisons to Raymond Carver, Sherwood Anderson, and Paul Auster. His new novel, PACIFIC, marks a triumphant return to the characters that launched his career two decades ago in the fictional Grouse County, Iowa, the setting of his landmark debut, The End of Vandalism.
When fourteen-year-old Micah Darling travels to Los Angeles to reunite with the mother who deserted him seven years ago, he finds himself out of his league in a land of magical freedom. He does new drugs with new people, falls in love with an enchanting but troubled equestrienne named Charlotte, and gets thrown out of school over the activities of a club called the New Luddites.
Back in the Midwest, an ethereal young woman comes to Stone City on a mission that will unsettle the lives of everyone she meets—including Micah’s half-sister, Lyris, who still fights fears of abandonment after a childhood in foster care, and Micah’s father, Tiny, a petty thief. An investigation into the stranger’s identity uncovers a darkly disturbed life, as parallel narratives of the comic and tragic, the mysterious and everyday, unfold in both the country and the city. A portrait of two disparate communities united by the restlessness and desperate hope of their residents, Drury’s haunted souls, adrift between promise and circumstance, reveal our infinite capacity to “get in and out of trouble in unexpected ways” and still find a semblance of peace at the end.
"As in his previous masterful novels, Drury weaves carefully metered sentences, deeply felt scenes, and struggling characters into an endlessly entertaining tapestry of human comedy and small-town living."—Jonathan Fullmer, Booklist
“Reading Pacific makes me once again fall in love with Drury’s words, and his perception of a world that is full of dangers and passions and mysteries and graces.” —Yiyun Li
Tom Drury's fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, and Mississippi Review. He is the author of The Driftless Area, The Black Brook, and Hunts in Dreams. Drury was raised in Iowa and lives with his wife and daughter in California.
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