I’m a relative newcomer to Jess Walter‘s work, and thus-far I’ve only read his short fiction — all of which has been superb, and I can’t recommend We Live in Water and The Angel of Rome highly enough. His extensive backlist includes crime/mysteries and contemporary fiction, all of which I’ve acquired over the past few years. I very much intend to get caught up on his books, but if I don’t get myself around to it in time, I think his latest may be the first of his novels that I read. So Far Gone is out next summer, and it sounds great:
A hilarious, empathetic, and brilliantly provocative adventure through life in modern America, about a reclusive journalist forced back into the world to rescue his kidnapped grandchildren.
Rhys Kinnick has gone off the grid. At Thanksgiving a few years back, a fed-up Rhys punched his conspiracy-theorist son-in-law in the mouth, chucked his smartphone out a car window and fled for a cabin in the woods, with no one around except a pack of hungry raccoons.
Now, seven years later, Kinnick’s old life is about to land right back on his crumbling doorstep. Can this failed husband and father, a man with no phone, no computer, and a car that barely runs, reemerge into a broken world to track down his missing daughter and save his sweet, precocious grandchildren from the members of a dangerous militia?
With the help of his caustic ex-girlfriend, a bipolar retired detective, and his only friend (who happens to be furious with him), Kinnick heads off on a madcap journey through cultural lunacy and the rubble of a life he thought he’d left behind.
Jess Walter’s So Far Gone is due to be published by Harper in North America and in the UK, on June 10th, 2025.
Civilian Reader 