""As talented a natural storyteller as is working in American fiction."" -Washington Post From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins comes a lively, smart, and deliciously funny new novel in the vein of True Grit, about a reclusive journalist who is suddenly thrown into a wild, suspenseful journey to rescue his kidnapped grandchildren. A few weeks after the 2016 election, at Thanksgiving with his daughter and her belligerent new husband, Rhys Kinnick finally snapped. After an escalating fight about politics, he hauled off and punched the jerk. Immediately horrified by what he'd done, by the state of the world around him and by his own spiraling mental health, Rhys chucked his smartphone out the car window and fled for a remote cabin in the woods of the Pacific Northwest. Seven years later, when his grandchildren show up on his doorstep, Rhys barely recognizes them. Their mother has disappeared, and they need a safer place to stay than with their father, who has taken up with a Christian Nationalist militia. So what if Rhys's cabin has no electricity or indoor plumbing, and the racoons help themselves to the monthly grocery haul? He'll do whatever he needs to for these sweet kids. But when the militia members show up and kidnap the children, Rhys realizes he'll have to re-enter the broken world. With the help of a bipolar retired detective and his caustic ex-girlfriend, Rhys reluctantly heads off on a madcap journey through the rubble of the life he left behind.
Narrator Edoardo Ballerini portrays Rhys Kinnick, a heartbroken retired environmental journalist and grandfather who tries to save his family. Ballerini delivers scenes playing out all over the country in which family members on opposite sides of the political fence argue and end up estranged due to disinformation and political manipulation. Kinnick cuts himself off from the world for seven years
