Blithedale Canyon [Paperback]

Trent Wolfer has blown it, in every possible way, over and over and over. And now he’s blowing it again. Fresh out of rehab, he’s back in his hometown working a dead-end job at a fast food joint and cutting out on his breaks to sneak airplane bottles of vodka and gin, when he looks up from his register one day to see Suze Randall, his closest friend from high school, now a radiant blonde single mother of two.Set in a small, sun-drenched Northern California town shifting from hippie haven to moneyed paradise, Blithedale Canyon asks whether a man who has spent his whole life screwing up can stop long enough to avoid destroying a woman he loves. Michael Bourne’s funny, edgy debut is a literary love story for every man who has ever wondered why he keeps smashing up the things he cares about, and for every woman who’s ever wondered what was going on in the head of that guy she spent her twenties trying to fix."Michael Bourne’s debut novel is an ode to the pleasures and pains of the return to the familiar, to the gravitational pulls of addiction, old friends, and Springsteen on a car stereo, but mostly of home.Blithedale Canyonis a tenderly nostalgic and page-turning portrait of a man who can’t control his worst impulses, written by an author in full command of his own tools." —Teddy Wayne, author ofThe Love Song of Jonny ValentineandLoner
 "We are surrounded by stories about winning, but where are all the great modern novels about failure?Blithedale Canyonis about Trent Wolfer who has lost almost everything. He moves back home to start fresh and quickly finds himself at risk of losing it all again. Bourne is brave enough to be honest and honest enough to write an unvarnished truth. This novel brims with humor, it's cathartic, original, and lonely. It's a wild ride." —Claire Cameron, author ofThe Last NeanderthalandThe Bear, a #1 Canadian bestsell3¹