Cycling — Greg Garrett

Brad Cannon is charming. And that's the problem. At the tender age of thirty, Brad is on the road to becoming a footnote in his own life. His professors and publishers alike have been salivating for the indifferent wunderkind's next big book, thanks in large part to the surprise Civil War bestseller he wrote while in his twenties. The problem is that he isn't writing it--not a word in five years. Instead, he chooses to spend his days biking along hot Texas roads, eating chicken-fried steak with his baseball-philosopher buddies, and courting a series of women whose lives he seems to drift in and out of like the tide. If anything gets to be too real, Brad can always hop on his bike and escape, pedaling fast past a life dotted with broken relationships, missed opportunities, and family tragedies so potent their memory still has the power to wound. It's those deeply painful losses that hide beneath Brad's Peter Pan act. But now, the years of frantic white lies are taking their toll. Brad's carefully compartmentalized life is starting to fall apart in a messy, very public way from which there's no escape. For Brad has violated his own rule--he has started to care, setting himself on a collision course with a love that could jeopardize what he's taken for granted, forcing him to fight for the very thing that could destroy him--or save him. Evoking Nick Hornby, Walker Percy, and Richard Ford--but with an affable, quirky Texas charm all his own--Greg Garrett has created a masterful meditation on love and loss, sorrow and survival--a heart-wrenching ride toward the tiny, tenuous connections that hold the promise of redemption.