So Far Gone

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

FINALIST FOR THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE

LONGLISTED FOR THE MARK TWAIN AMERICAN VOICE IN LITERATURE AWARD

“A warm, funny, loving novel. . . . It’s an American original.”—Ann Patchett, New York Times bestselling author of Tom Lake

“Searing and sublime … Walter is a slyly adept social critic, and has clearly invested his protagonist with all of the outrage and heartbreak he himself feels about the dark course our world has taken … What gets us all through … are novels like this one.” Leigh Haber, Los Angeles Times.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins—and in the propulsive spirit of Charles Portis’ True Grit—comes a hilarious, empathetic, and brilliantly provocative adventure through life in modern America, about a reclusive journalist forced back into the world to rescue his kidnapped grandchildren.

Rhys Kinnick has gone off the grid. At Thanksgiving a few years back, a fed-up Rhys punched his conspiracy-theorist son-in-law in the mouth, chucked his smartphone out a car window and fled for a cabin in the woods, with no one around except a pack of hungry raccoons.

Now Kinnick’s old life is about to land right back on his crumbling doorstep. Can this failed husband and father, a man with no internet and a car that barely runs, reemerge into a broken world to track down his missing daughter and save his sweet, precocious grandchildren from the members of a dangerous militia?

With the help of his caustic ex-girlfriend, a bipolar retired detective, and his only friend (who happens to be furious with him), Kinnick heads off on a wild journey through cultural lunacy and the rubble of a life he thought he’d left behind. So Far Gone is a rollicking, razor-sharp, and moving road trip through a fractured nation, from a writer who has been called “a genius of the modern American moment” (Philadelphia Inquirer).