A reflective contemporary novel exploring the nuances of everyday routine, identity, and the quiet disillusionment of modern life.
Miles Shepard is thirty years old and stuck in a life that looks stable from the outside but feels hollow underneath. The promises made by the adults who raised him no longer seem to resemble the life he was told to expect.
When summer break arrives, he decides to finally begin writing the novel he has spent years avoiding. Instead, he falls back into familiar routines, drifting between bars, chasing women, and repeating the same patterns that have always kept him in place.
Set in coastal South Carolina, the novel follows Miles as he moves through worlds of class, status, and meaning over the course of a single summer. He encounters barflies, real estate agents, and blue-collar workers, each pursuing their own version of purpose while projecting competing ideas of what it means to live a good life.
What begins as a search for inspiration gradually turns into something more unsettling, forcing him to confront the illusions and fears shaping the life he can no longer continue to ignore.