Don't Skip Out on Me: Willy Vlautin - Softcover

Vlautin, Willy

4.13

3,098 ratings by Goodreads

9780571301645: Don't Skip Out on Me: Willy Vlautin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571301649 ISBN 13: 9780571301645

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2018

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'Magnificent. Vlautin is now one of America's great writers.' RODDY DOYLE

'Vlautin is one of the bravest novelists writing.' URSULA K. LE GUIN

First printing includes exclusive free CD soundtrack by Richmond Fontaine

Meet Horace Hopper, a twenty-one-year-old farm hand in Tonopah, Nevada, who works for Mr Reece and his wife, the nearest thing he's had to family in years.

But Horace, half-white half-Paiute Indian, dreams of bigger things. Leaving behind the farm and its fragile stability, he heads South to re-invent himself as the Mexican boxer Hector Hidalgo. Slowly, painfully, the possibility emerges that his dreams might not just be the delusions of a lost soul. but at what cost, and what of those he's left behind?

Exploring the fringes of contemporary America, Don't Skip Out on Me is an extraordinary work of compassion - a novel about the need for human connection and understanding - and essential reading, now more than ever.

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Review:

This is magnificent. Vlautin is now one of America's great writers., RODDY DOYLE

Beautifully crushing and complete., JOHN DOE, co-founder of X

Vlautin will break your heart ... he's the champion of the marginalised, the traumatised, the lonely and the bereft ... Don't Skip Out on Me is his best novel yet., JONATHAN EVISON, author of The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving

Willy Vlautin is the poet laureate of the downtrodden and disenfranchised underclass of American society, detailing with real empathy and insight the daily struggle of his characters in modern society. Two of his four novels to date have been made into movies, with the forthcoming Lean on Petecreating a real buzz on the festival circuit. This fifth novel is just as touching and hardbitten as his previous work, telling the story of Horace Hopper, a young farm hand in rural Nevada who leaves the farm and heads for the city to try to fulfill his dream to be a professional boxer. Brutal and tender in equal measure, this is exemplary storytelling, Big Issue

'Vivid. A classic alt-country lament, evoking the loneliness of life, the road and being a man. This is the book of the song... There's a plangent beauty in Horace's love for the rural life clashing with the pressure of earning a living and his desire for self-determination', The Times

'Vlautin is on to something about what's wrong with America, and with many Americans, especially in the age of Trump... There is something self-defeating in Horace's personality that exemplifies an unfortunate tendency among certain Americans, corporate managers and factory workers alike: even though they boast about rugged independence, they're all too willing to take abuse... The tension over whose sensibility will prevail makes this book worth reading - but it infuses it with a peculiarly American sort of pain.', Spectator

'Willy is a wonderful, wonderful writer, dubbed the "Dylan of the dislocated". . . [recommended] with as many stars as there are in the heavens' -- Roisin Dwyer, Arena

'Vlautin's sparse, plain sentences are well-matched to the brutal world he depicts. At the same time, his compassion for his characters never wavers. For aching humanity, Vlautin pulls no punches', Sunday Times

'He's the literary version of a Neil Young or a Tom Petty, bearing a ragged standard for empathy, compassion and decency, defending notions of the story as a sorting office for the soul. In other words, he's a throwback to a generation of novelists who still championed the underclass and promoted socialist values in fiction: everyone from John Steinbeck to Nelson Algren, or, more latterly, William Kennedy or Annie Proulx.

As a writer, his style is straightforward and unadorned - echoing Hemingway's line about the simple, declarative sentence - but his concerns are profound. At times he reads like Stephen King without the supernatural, the way his eye fixes on the small details of people's lives: sack lunches and microwave dinners and cheap beers.'

, Irish Times

'At heart this is a parable of sorts; a sensitive, insightful study of loneliness and how hard it is to live through the sacrifices needed to discover your utmost limits, as well as how much it hurts to do so...There's a more than ordinary tenderness in this novel, where love is 'a good kind of force' and the characters aren't perfect, but trying.', Caught by the River

Book Description:

First novel in four years from the much-loved Willy Vlautin, of the bands Richmond Fontaine and The Delines. Publishing just ahead of the cinema release of his IMPAC Prize shortlisted novel Lean on Pete.

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