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Almost Always: a novel
Patrick O'Brien and David Chen meet during two magical weeks at the University of Chicago in the mid-1980s—a connection so profound it feels like coming home. Then tragedy strikes, and David disappears to California, leaving Patrick with nothing but memory and longing.
Over the next fifteen years, their lives orbit each other in agonizing a weekend in New York where everything feels possible again, a lunch in Chicago heavy with unspoken words, late-night phone calls that circle around what they really want to say. The geography is impossible. The timing is always wrong. They're always almost—but never quite—together.
Patrick builds a careful life in successful career, family obligations, the quiet routines of a man who's learned not to want too much. David thrives in New York's financial world, collecting lovers and accomplishments while secretly filling journals about the one person he can't forget. Both measure every relationship against those two perfect weeks, wondering if they'll ever feel that complete again.
When a desperate late-night call finally shatters years of careful distance, they face an impossible dismantle the safe lives they've built for a love that's already failed them twice? But even when they finally find the courage to try, Patrick and David discover that some obstacles can't be overcome by love alone—no matter how deep, how patient, or how hard-won.
Almost Always is a decades-spanning love story about the different shapes love takes and the price of living authentically. For readers who loved Call Me By Your Name and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo —a devastating, beautiful reminder that love's true measure isn't duration, but depth.
Over the next fifteen years, their lives orbit each other in agonizing a weekend in New York where everything feels possible again, a lunch in Chicago heavy with unspoken words, late-night phone calls that circle around what they really want to say. The geography is impossible. The timing is always wrong. They're always almost—but never quite—together.
Patrick builds a careful life in successful career, family obligations, the quiet routines of a man who's learned not to want too much. David thrives in New York's financial world, collecting lovers and accomplishments while secretly filling journals about the one person he can't forget. Both measure every relationship against those two perfect weeks, wondering if they'll ever feel that complete again.
When a desperate late-night call finally shatters years of careful distance, they face an impossible dismantle the safe lives they've built for a love that's already failed them twice? But even when they finally find the courage to try, Patrick and David discover that some obstacles can't be overcome by love alone—no matter how deep, how patient, or how hard-won.
Almost Always is a decades-spanning love story about the different shapes love takes and the price of living authentically. For readers who loved Call Me By Your Name and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo —a devastating, beautiful reminder that love's true measure isn't duration, but depth.
332 pages, Hardcover
Published October 26, 2025
About the author
Michael Manosca
24 books8 followersMichael Manosca writes about the people others are uneasy mentioning — the ones who are gay, or don't quite fit, or carry some small difference that makes a stranger smile and keep walking. He writes them because he has been one of them, and because somewhere along the way he learned the truth his books keep circling back to: family is not always the people you are born to. It is whoever steps up and says I want you here.
Every novel he has written grows from someone real — a friend, a stranger, a version of himself, a man he loved. He doesn't write to be an author. He writes so that one person, somewhere, might open a book and find themselves inside it — and understand that for all the ways we talk ourselves into being alone, almost none of us truly wants to be.
He came to fiction by way of the arts, studying in Chicago, and it shows in how he builds a scene: visually, patiently, trusting a small gesture to carry the weight. He lives along the western coast of the United States and has written more than a dozen novels, with another always underway.
Every novel he has written grows from someone real — a friend, a stranger, a version of himself, a man he loved. He doesn't write to be an author. He writes so that one person, somewhere, might open a book and find themselves inside it — and understand that for all the ways we talk ourselves into being alone, almost none of us truly wants to be.
He came to fiction by way of the arts, studying in Chicago, and it shows in how he builds a scene: visually, patiently, trusting a small gesture to carry the weight. He lives along the western coast of the United States and has written more than a dozen novels, with another always underway.
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