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Shop nowSome Hell
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Learn moreA wrenching and layered debut novel about a gay teen’s coming-of-age in the aftermath of his father’s suicide
Middle school hasn’t been going well for Colin. His teenage sister teases him mercilessly, his autistic brother lashes out at him, and he has a crush on his best friend, Andy. But after the tragic night when his father commits suicide, none of that matters.
Diane, Colin’s mother, seeks solace in therapy. Colin is awash in guilt, and casts about for someone to confide in: first his estranged grandfather, then a predatory science teacher. But nothing helps as much as the strange writing his father kept in a series of notebooks locked in his study. Colin looks for answers there―in fragments about disaster scenarios, the violence of snow, mustangs running wild in the west―but instead finds the writing infecting his worldview.
Diane, meanwhile, has a miserable fling with a coworker, and leans more heavily on Colin for support as things go from bad to worse. But spring is unfolding, and a road trip to Los Angeles gives them a tantalizing glimpse of what the future might hold.
In Some Hell, a debut novel of devastating intensity and aching, pointillistic detail, Patrick Nathan shows how unspeakable tragedy shapes a life and how imagination saves us from ourselves.
Patrick Nathan’s short fiction and essays have appeared in Gulf Coast, Boulevard, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. He lives in Minneapolis.
Graham Halstead, an Earphones Award and Audie Award–winning narrator, is a professionally trained actor and voice artist. As an actor, he has worked internationally in Edinburgh and London, as well as at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. His youthful, easy-flowing voice can be heard on television and radio voicing spots for Airborne and Allegra.
Reviews
“A very different literary thriller, one in which the mystery is not who killed the victim but how those who kill might live with what they’ve done…A canny and terrifying moral fable about our new and old American ways of both being together and missing each other.”
“A heartbreaker of a book, Patrick Nathan’s debut novel captures the hell of adolescence under particularly dire circumstances.”
“Each sentence of this dark Bildungsroman—obsessed with the intertwined logics of desire, disaster, and death—kept me enthralled.”
“Skillful, beautifully written…Nathan’s first novel is beautifully done and promises to linger in the reader’s memory.”
“Intoxicating…All-consuming…A magnetic first novel combining wit, sex, and apocalyptic reverie.”
“The full-heartedness in Colin’s capacity for hope and love even amidst his crumbling surroundings is what makes all of the weight of this book bearable. That sliver of hope is what allows us to see this story through to the end, with the idea that maybe even those in the worst of circumstances one can find something like peace.”
“Readers will find moments of beauty in the rawness of grief’s confusions and yearning.”
“This gorgeous, shape-shifting novel dares to address the burden of becoming. Nathan is a true talent, evoking the intensity of adolescence and the gut-punch we feel when reality comes bearing down on us.”
“Some Hell is an enthralling family saga that layers the slapstick giddiness of adolescence and sexual questing with a seething darkness. This is exactly the recipe for growing up with trauma.”
“Startlingly propulsive, utterly enveloping, and a genuine revelation.”
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