A New York Times Editors' Choice
A San Francisco Chronicle Recommended Book

An Amazon.com Best Book of the Month

Praise for Pacific

"Reading Pacific makes me once again fall in love with Drury's words, and his perception of a world that is full of dangers and passions and mysteries and graces." -Yiyun Li

"I like [Drury's] oddball but easygoing rhythm. . . . I like his occasional bouts of absurdity. . . . All great books are strange. Every lasting work of literature since the very weird Beowulf has been strange, not only because it grapples with the strangeness around us, but also because the effect of originality is startling, making even the oldest books feel like brand-new stories. . . . Drury overlays the grand and mythic with the specific and everyday, giving ordinary moments the majesty of legend. . . . [He] gives us the wondrous and engaging stuff of real storytelling, of actual inquiry and investigation into the haunting and jokey puzzles of the world, at a time when so much literature stops short of invoking something larger or spends so much time touting grand themes that it forgets to make something happen. Pacific is a terrific book, and a strange one, as strange as the world and the great literature that helps us make our way through it." --Daniel Handler, The New York Times Book Review

"Drury gives his characters the sharpest dialogue I've read in some time. He's interested in people, their odd decisions and their strange perceptions about everyday things. . . . Drury never loses focus. . . . Each new character [he] introduces plucks an intricate web, and the reverberations are felt far and wide. On the surface, Pacific is a disarmingly plain tale about people managing loss. But look closer, and you'll see it's as deep as the ocean it's named after." --Don Waters, San Francisco Chronicle

"For most of the characters in Drury's novels, we do not know height or weight, hair or eye color (Louise, a redhead, is a notable exception), nor do we generally know states of mind and heart beyond those expressed in the character's own words. And yet they are intensely real and rich and rounded presences, and--in the case of those from the earlier two novels--it is nice to see them again . . . Many in Pacific make mistakes, many lose things they think they could never stand to lose, and yet on they go in the rough old world, and you with them, peaceful at heart." --Leland de la Durantaye, Los Angeles Review of Books

"The third of Drury's books set in the fictional Grouse County, IA (following The End of Vandalism and Hunts in Dreams) Pacific catches up with characters Drury fans have come to cherish. It's just a beautiful book of quiet power that deserves recognition as a contemporary classic, with Drury one of our living masters." --McSweeney's Recommends

"Elegant, simple prose . . . Drury's fiction is chockablock with . . . tiny epics unfurling and resolving in quick, universally funny vignettes. In Pacific, these center around the characters from his debut, The End of Vandalism, certainly among the funniest, most humane American novels of the last quarter-century. . . . The philosophy in [his] fiction resides somewhere between humanism and absurdism. . . . [Pacific] has a Hollywood audition scene as unsettling, absurd, and deadpan as anything in Sunset Boulevard . . . [and a] pitch-perfect satire of a [student activist group] worthy of Wet Hot American Summer." --Eugenia Williamson, The Boston Globe

"There are novels you read to find out what happens next, and novels you read to linger in the moment. Tom Drury&#