The Last Days of California

Mary Miller

Paperback

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Jess is fifteen years old and waiting for the world to end. Her evangelical father has packed up the family to drive west to California, hoping to save as many souls as possible before the Second Coming. With her long-suffering mother and rebellious (and secretly pregnant) sister, Jess hands out tracts to nonbelievers at every rest stop, Waffle House, and gas station along the way. As Jess's belief frays, her teenage myopia evolves into awareness about her fracturing family. Selected as a Barnes & Noble Discover pick and an Indie Next pick, Mary Miller's radiant debut novel reinvigorates the literary road-trip story with wry vulnerability and savage charm.

Book Details

Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publish Date: Sep 2nd, 2014
Pages: 256
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 8.20in - 5.40in - 0.70in - 0.45lb
EAN: 9780871408419
Categories: • Literary• Science Fiction - Apocalyptic & Post-Apocalyptic• Humorous - General

About the Author

Miller, Mary: - Mary Miller is the author of three previous books, including the story collection Always Happy Hour and the novel The Last Days of California. She is a former James A. Michener Fellow and John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence. She lives in Oxford, Mississippi.

Praise for this book

An affecting coming-of-age story from an inspired new voice.--Elliott Holt, author of You are One of Them

A literary snapshot of our times that portrays the affirmation and doubt we often find in family and faith.--Wiley Cash, New York Times best-selling author of This Dark Road to Mercy and A Land More Kind Than Home

Hilarious and heartbreaking, dark and beautiful, a novel written by one of the most observant and mordant writers alive...This book is terrific.--Elizabeth McCracken, author of An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination and The Giant's House

The Last Days of California is the Sense and Sensibility of pre-Apocalypse America, and Jess and Elise may be my new favorite literary sisters: different as night and day, on a road trip to the Rapture with their Evangelical parents, they find they have nothing to lose but each other. Mary Miller is a ventriloquist of adolescent angst and a nervy surveyor of American culture.--Alexis Smith, author of Glaciers

The Last Days of California is a beautiful examination of youth and family and what it means to be alive (and to fear dying) in contemporary America...every scene...tremble[s] with significance... Rarely, if ever, have we seen young American womanhood painted in such a raw and honest and heartbreaking way.--William Boyle "Los Angeles Review of Books"

Miller portrays her characters...with an unwavering intensity.... Miller's prose bestows a magnetic beauty on gas-station bathroom stops, Waffle House lunches, and the cast of overfed, overstimulated travelers the Metcalfs encounter along the interstates. ...A plangent portrait of American adolescence.... [She delivers] raw the heartbreaking futility of the Metcalfs' small triumphs, private embarrassments, and poor decisions with such hilarious precision that you become completely involved in their struggles--and, ultimately, in awe of their abiding hope.--Catherine Straut "ELLE"

Miller's depiction of a squabbling, love-you-one-minute, hate-you-the-next family dynamic is spot-on, hilarious, and ultra-relatable.... Sometimes a road-trip novel, particularly one as compulsively devourable as The Last Days of California, is just what you need to get that elusively giddy, hopeful feeling back.--Hannah Hickok "Redbook"