Description
One of the New York Times' “Novels We’re Excited About This Spring”
David Lynch meets Fight Club in T.C. Boyle’s No Way Home, an obsessive psychological study that illuminates the darkness that lurks inside all of us.
Turn the page and he’s heading north on I-15 though a lifeless desert to the small Nevada town where his mother has retired. Overwhelmed with grief and the burden of having to sort out the remnants of his mother’s life, including the house and car she has left him, he stops at a café and has a chance encounter with a pretty young local girl in a turquoise minidress. What seems to him a chance meeting like so many we all experience daily will come to upend his life and morph into a fatal obsession.
For Bethany, a receptionist at the local hospital, who, like many twenty-somethings, is trying to sort out her options in life while haunting the local bars and clubs, this chance encounter is anything but trivial. Down on her luck after breaking up with her boyfriend and surreptitiously living out of her storage unit, she finds Terrence attractive on a number of counts, not least of which is his status as a doctor and, by default, a homeowner.
What follows becomes the heart of No Way Home, a propulsive narrative with cinematic overtones in the tradition of Mulholland Drive and the cold hard lyricism of Cormac McCarthy and Robert Stone, as Terrence is drawn into a toxic love triangle with Bethany and her former beau, Jesse. No longer in control of his ordered and once-predictable life, Terrence becomes hostage to a world where shots of tequila and violent brawls puncture the daily grind of nowhere jobs, aimless sex, and recreational highs—a rootless existence from which there appears to be no escape and no fixed refuge.
Stylistically shimmering and unraveling under a harsh desert sky crenellated by the peaks of the Nevada mountains, T. C. Boyle’s narrative explores what it is, on an animal level, to fight over a woman and what retribution really looks like. Can sexual jealousy breed a thirst for vengeance that becomes desperately pathological? In the hands of “one of America’s greatest living novelists” (Los Angeles Review of Books), No Way Home is a chilling tour de force by an American master at his very best.
Reviews
"A relentless, electrifying, noirish tale of seduction, lies, denial, anger, violence, and capitulation set in the pitiless desert along the shores of the disastrously shrinking Lake Mead . . . . A gripping, forensically exacting novel of pathological behavior, an MRI scan of human nature." — Booklist
"For his tense latest, Boyle returns to the desert terrain that has long served as a crucible and moral testing ground in his novels . . . None of the central characters emerges unscathed from Boyle’s piercing depictions of their transactional and self-serving behavior. This sharply observed novel will keep readers turning the pages." — Publishers Weekly
"PEN/Faulkner winner T.C. Boyle has crafted a haunting, David Lynchian read. After his mother dies, Terrence, a medical resident at a Los Angeles hospital, drives to the Nevada desert town where she lived. There, he gets involved with a pretty young receptionist and her ex-boyfriend and falls into a nihilistic world of tequila, drugs, cheap sex and violence." — Hailey Eber, New York Post
"No Way Home will be remembered as one of T. C. Boyle’s most vividly rendered narratives, a concerto of malaise and stymied hope in a town spurned by progress, his people caged by the brutal fate of those far from grace. Boyle has added an enthralling cinematic beauty to an oeuvre unlike any other in American literature, a novel that is certain to endear him to those in a new generation of readers for whom reading well matters." — William Giraldi, author of Hold the Dark
"A wickedly absorbing tale of bodies and souls in passionate collision. Suspenseful, tough, and atmospheric, a contemporary western of the heart." — Walter Kirn, author of Up in the Air and Blood Will Out
Standalone Ebook
9781324097532
COMING SOON