First published 2026
Lee Clarke gets his draft notice in 1967 Los Angeles. The twenty-three-year-old from Concrete, Washington has just been expelled from UCLA after a fistfight, losing his student deferment. Rather than report for Vietnam duty, he decides to flee to Canada. Lee signs up with a car delivery service and lands a brand-new Jaguar headed east. He packs a suitcase and a bag of amphetamines, then starts driving across America. The drugs keep him wired as he travels, but he can't stop thinking about the girlfriend and life he's abandoning. His route takes him through four northern towns where his family members live. He visits his degraded World War II veteran father, his manic mother performing endless theatrics with her reclusive sibling, his bitter brother Harry, and finally his twin sister Grace, who's training as a nurse at a Manhattan psychiatric hospital while navigating her own romantic chaos. Each stop reveals how fractured his family has become, mirroring a country splitting apart over war.
Genres: literary-fiction, american-fiction, 20th-century, contemporary, family-drama
Vibes: character-driven, fragmented, introspective, melancholic, poignant
Tropes: coming-of-age, family-reunion, internal-conflict, road-trip
Setting: Los Angeles, Concrete, Washington, UCLA, Canada, Manhattan, Northern towns
Period: 1967, Vietnam War era
272 pages · Paperback · Harper Large Print
Content warnings: drug-use, mental-illness, war