Description
Book SynopsisIt's 1978, the year after Elvis Presley died, and Kepler Pressler is a sixteen-year-old Toronto kid with an obsessive attachment to his sock monkey, a tendency to burst into tears, a mother with a nail fetish and a fondness for Shakespeare, and a father who says he works for the Space Agency and disappears a lot. Is dad dead? And what exactly happened on Kepler's 16th birthday? He is devoting a year to figuring it out in a mental health institute.
Trade Review"The son of an alcoholic, taxi-driving, amateur astronomer and a disillusioned manicurist, Kepler Pressler the anti-hero of Adam Honsingers startlingly assured first novel does for the family-dysfunction novel what Elvis did for rock 'n roll: he makes it bluesier, edgier, funnier, better." -- Annabel Lyon
"admirably zany without ever tipping into quirk." -- The Winnipeg Review
"Nervy, audacious domestic drama with the guile and electricity of a Presley hip swivel, Gracelessland proves what many of us have long suspected: Honsinger is a writer of immeasurable talent, and family is an affliction from which few recover." -- Nancy Lee
"The broad-strokes familiarity of the overarching narrative allows Keplers personal peculiarities and Honsinger's skills as a writer to shine through ... a novel that feels fresh, rich, and heavy with the thrum of life." Robert Wiersema, Quill and Quire
