Pacific - Paperback

by Tom Drury (Author)

"A truly great writer" returns to the Midwest characters and setting of his landmark debut novel, The End of Vandalism (Esquire).

When fourteen-year-old Micah Darling travels to Los Angeles to reunite with the mother who abandoned 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 his 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.

"Pacific is a terrific book, and a strange one, as strange as the world and the great literature that helps us make our way through it."--The New York Times Book Review

"On the surface, Pacific is a disarmingly plain tale about people managing loss. But look closer, and you'll see it's as deep as the ocean it's named after."--San Francisco Chronicle

"If The End of Vandalism provided a world for readers to slow down and catch their breath, Pacific is determined to knock it out of them."--New York Observer

Author Biography

Tom Drury is the author of Pacific, longlisted for the National Book Award; The End of Vandalism; Hunts in Dreams; The Driftless Area; and The Black Brook. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, and the Mississippi Review. Drury has been a Guggenheim Fellow and was named one of Granta's "Best Young American Novelists." He lives in Iowa.