Exley — Brock Clarke

The bestselling author of An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England returns with another wry and insightful novel about truth and reality, this time featuring a confused young boy and his slightly unstable therapist.

For nine-year-old Miller, who lives in Watertown, New York, with his mother, life has become a struggle to make sense of his father's disappearance. When he becomes convinced that he has found his father in the local VA hospital, lying comatose, a victim of the war in Iraq, Miller begins a search for the one person he believes can save him: the famously reclusive -- and, unfortunately, dead -- Frederick Exley, a Watertown native and the author of his father's favorite book, the "fictional memoir" A Fan's Notes. The story of Miller's search, told by both Miller himself and his somewhat flaky therapist, ultimately becomes an exploration of how challenging it can be to reconcile the difference between what we believe to be real and what is in fact real. Part literary satire, part mystery, Exley unleashes the enormous talent of a writer critics have compared variously to Richard Ford and John Irving.