A new gripping, literary tour-de-force from Patrick deWitt takes on a journey where a young man is forced to decide between his moral principles, his family, and his country.
UNTITLED NEW NOVEL
by Patrick deWitt
Ecco, Spring 2027
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)
It’s the 1960s, and our protagonist Max—a straight-laced young man from a blue-collar background who has unfortunately just been kicked out of school because of a fight—is living in California, but is a citizen of both Canada and the USA. Max very much considers the United States his home, but when he receives a draft notice, he decides that it’s time for him to leave the country he loves and head north. As Max travels across the land to bid farewell to his various family members, he struggles with whether it’s the right thing to say goodbye to the people he loves forever in order to remain true to his beliefs.
A moving, funny, emotional tour de force from one of our most creative and talented living novelists.
Patrick deWitt is the author of the critically acclaimed The Librarianist, French Exit, Ablutions: Notes for a Novel, as well as the novels Undermajordomo Minor and The Sisters Brothers, which was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. deWitt has won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Stephen Leacock Medal, an Oregon Book Award, and he was shortlisted twice for the Giller Prize. Born in British Columbia, Canada, he has also lived in California and Washington, and now resides in Portland, Oregon.


Walter Simmering is searching for love and purpose in a city he doesn’t realize is fading away—San Francisco in 1993, at the height of the AIDS epidemic and the dawn of the tech revolution. Out of college, out of the closet, and transplanted from the Midwest, Walter is irresistibly drawn from his shell when he meets Cary Menuhin and Sasha Stravinsky, a dynamic couple who live blithely beyond the boundaries of gender and sexuality. Witty and ultra-stylish, Cary and Sasha seem to have stepped straight out of a sultry film noir, captivating Walter through a shared obsession with cinema and Hollywood’s golden age.
Do you trust the couple next door?