From Holden Caulfield to Moses Herzog, our best literature has been narrated by malcontents. To this lineage add Peter Jernigan, who views the world with ferocious intelligence, grim rapture, and a chainsaw wit that he turns, with disastrous consequences, on his wife, his teenaged son, his dangerously vulnerable mistress and, not least of all, on himself. This novel is a bravura performance: a funny, scary, mesmerizing study of a man walking off the edge with his eyes wide open wisecracking all the way."

"Beautifully written.... Gates [has a] pitch-perfect ear for contemporary speech...and...[a] keen, journalistic eye."--Michiko Kakutani, "The New York Times
In this comic, fiercely compassionate novel, David Gates, whose first novel Jernigan was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, sends his protagonist on a visceral journey to the dark side of suburban masculinity, explores the claims youth makes on middle age, and the tenacious --at times perverse--power of love to assert itself.
When Doug Willis has a mid-life crisis, he doesn't join a gym or have an affair. Instead he gets himself...

By July 1807, following his spectacular victories over Austria, Prussia and Russia, Napoleon dominated most of Europe. The only significant gap in his continental system was the Iberian Peninsula. He therefore began a series of diplomatic and military moves aimed at forcing Spain and Portugal to tow the line, leading to a popular uprising against the French and the outbreak of war in May 1808.

A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me is populated by characters, young, old or somewhere in between, who are broadly knowledgeable and often creative and variously accomplished, whether as doctors, composers, academics or journalists. Terrifyingly self-aware, each one of them carries the full weight of the human condition: parents in assisted-living facilities, too many or too few people in their families and marriages, the ties that bind a sometimes messy knot, age an implacable foe, impulses pulling them away from comfort into distraction or catastrophe. In settings that range across the...