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So Far Gone

A Novel

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So Far Gone

By: Jess Walter
Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
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About this listen

National Bestseller Longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize

"A warm, funny, loving novel. . . . It's an American original."—Ann Patchett, New York Times bestselling author of Tom Lake

"Searing and sublime … Walter is a slyly adept social critic, and has clearly invested his protagonist with all of the outrage and heartbreak he himself feels about the dark course our world has taken ... What gets us all through … are novels like this one.” Leigh Haber, Los Angeles Times.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins—and in the propulsive spirit of Charles Portis’ True Grit—comes a hilarious, empathetic, and brilliantly provocative adventure through life in modern America, about a reclusive journalist forced back into the world to rescue his kidnapped grandchildren.

Rhys Kinnick has gone off the grid. At Thanksgiving a few years back, a fed-up Rhys punched his conspiracy-theorist son-in-law in the mouth, chucked his smartphone out a car window and fled for a cabin in the woods, with no one around except a pack of hungry raccoons.

Now Kinnick’s old life is about to land right back on his crumbling doorstep. Can this failed husband and father, a man with no internet and a car that barely runs, reemerge into a broken world to track down his missing daughter and save his sweet, precocious grandchildren from the members of a dangerous militia?

With the help of his caustic ex-girlfriend, a bipolar retired detective, and his only friend (who happens to be furious with him), Kinnick heads off on a wild journey through cultural lunacy and the rubble of a life he thought he’d left behind. So Far Gone is a rollicking, razor-sharp, and moving road trip through a fractured nation, from a writer who has been called “a genius of the modern American moment” (Philadelphia Inquirer).

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It is very America-centric and banging on about the pandemic and Trump's re-election will no doubt date it in years to come. I actually agreed with a lot of the protagonist's views but found his point of view fairly boring. The whole story is fairly boring and centred around the characters and their lives more than the plot. None of the plot points are exciting or gripping either, just a trudge through Americana following an old man who doesn't know what a smartphone is.

The narration on the audiobook was good and the ending was at least how you would expect a book set in America to end. That was about it. Would not recommend.

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