Dream State

DANIELLE EVANS, author of The Office of Historical Corrections

Cece is in love. She has arrived early at her in-laws' beautiful lake house in Salish, Montana, to finish planning her wedding to Charlie, a cardiac anaesthesiologist with a brilliant future.

When Charlie asks Garrett, his best friend from college, to officiate the ceremony, Cece can't imagine anyone less appropriate for the task. After all, Garrett, a depressed baggage handler at the local airport, doesn't believe in marriage. But as she spends time with him and his gruff mask slips, she grows increasingly uncertain about her future, leading to an impulsive decision that will alter the three friends' lives forever - the events of that summer reverberating across fifty years and spanning generations.

Simultaneously following in the tradition of the great American novel and reinventing it from within, Dream State is at once an elegy to the endangered West, a study of the unholy catastrophe of marriage and a tender ode to the enduring beauty of friendship.

About the Author

Eric Puchner is the author of the novelModel Home, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and winner of a California Book Award, and two collections of short stories. His fiction and personal essays have appeared in GQ, Granta, Tin House, Best American Short Stories and more. He has received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and is an associate professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. Eric lives in Baltimore with his wife, the novelist Katharine Noel, and their two children.