This Is the End of Something But It’s Not the End of You

by Adam Gnade

Adam Gnade's third novel is held up by a Springsteenian sense of hope and a desire for redemption, of finding glory and escape, friendship and love in hard times. Like Dickens' David Copperfield, Ferrante's Neapolitan tetralogy, and Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle series, this is the story of a human life, kindergarten to adulthood, ratty beach apartment to bohemian party house, feverish basement to ramshackle farmhouse. Through the eyes of Gnade's protagonist, James Jackson Bozic, we see how life scars you, changes you as you fight to find a safe place for yourself. It is, in turn, a murder mystery, a love story, and a vast, sweeping, panoramic look at America on the edge of collapse. It's a story of displacement, strange shores, new mornings. As James says in the book, "I thought of how sometimes in the midst of survival, life will jerk you away from your home, how it will push you out across the map, away from the people you love, or into the path of others." This Is the End... is about scratching and clawing for a better, safer, more satisfying life, even as the sky comes crashing down.

227 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 14, 2020

About the author

Adam Gnade’s (guh nah dee) work is released as a series of books and "talking songs" that share characters and themes; the fiction writing continuing plot-lines left open by the self-described “talking songs” in an attempt to compile a vast, detailed, interconnected, personal history of contemporary American life. His books and "talking records" are released by Bread & Roses Press and Three One G.