Bewilderment

After three decades of an over-extended youth abroad, fifty-six-year-old Wade Ricky returns home to the Los Angeles suburbs to care for his dying mother and come to terms with his memories of an awkwardly sensual affair with Herta, a German woman he meets while biking across India; a two-year stint in Peshawar as an assistant to a blind British expat; and a cheerfully surreal world of drugs and sexual voyeurism in which Wade is continually a complicit outsider. As months turn into years, Wade finds companionship with a landscape painter grieving for her son killed in Iraq and slowly rebuilds his life in America--even as he begins to understand, finally, why he must be alone.

In pared-down, richly evocative prose that captures the hidden complexities of social and geopolitical relations, Michael Onofrey's debut novel is a loving, even joyful meditation about the transience of human connection and the experience of solitude.