Balloon Dog — Daniel Paisner

What happens when the life you are living is no longer the life you imagined? When you are well and truly stuck? A darkly comic tale of longing and legacy, Balloon Dog, the fourth novel from best-selling ghostwriter Daniel Paisner, prompts readers to consider what it means to leave a mark and what it takes to be swept up in the same currents that move almost everyone else.

A brazen art heist pushes our protagonists to reflect on the choices they've made-and the ones that have been made for them. Set in the near- present, the story turns on the ill-conceived theft of a high-end Jeff Koons sculpture, lifted in plain sight from its perch beside a luxurious mountain home in Park City, Utah, and follows the musings, misadventures, and meeting of minds of a Long Island writer in midlife crisis and the art thief behind the ill conception.

Balloon Dog poses two central questions: Is the transformative power of art enough to lift us from our days? And what is art, anyway?