Dream State - by Eric Puchner (Hardcover)

About the Book

"PEN/Faulkner Award finalist, Pushcart Prize winner, and Best American Stories contributor, Eric Puchner returns with an ambitious and deeply moving novel set against the backdrop of the American West that follows three lifelong friends and the betrayal at the center of their entwined fates. Cece and Charlie are in love and a few weeks away from their summer wedding. But when Cece meets Charlie's best friend from college, Garrett, her long-held expectations for her future begin to crumble. As Garrett's gruff mask slips, Cece begins to anticipate the big day with dread as her feelings for Garrett become impossible to bury. And as she decides to follow her instincts, ditching her groom for his best man, she will alter the three of their lives forever, the events of that July reverberating through marriage, parenthood, and, in the end, across generations. Years later, Cece's daughter, Lana, and Charlie's son, Jasper, meet and become fast friends, finding themselves reunited again and again throughout their adolescence. Soon enough, they find themselves enacting their parents' mistakes, falling victim to duplicity and heartbreak, with age and mortality looming. With Montana's once-warm summers growing untenably hot, and the nearby lake all but drying up, obscured only by the ceaseless smoke of wildfires, Garrett's career as a wildlife researcher feels increasingly futile. As he watches Cece begin to lose herself, Charlie wonders whether he will ever find stability, especially with a son failing to adjust to the demands of adulthood. With delicacy, precision, and enormous heart, Dream State is at once a study of the unholy catastrophe of marriage, and a tender ode to the beauty of impermanence"--

Book Synopsis

"Dream State is a delight...An exquisitely rendered novel about the vagaries of fate, and friendship, and love." --Alice McDermott, National Book Award winner and author of Absolution

Cece is in love. She has arrived early at her future in-laws' lake house in Salish, Montana, to finish planning her wedding to Charlie, a young doctor with a brilliant life ahead of him. Charlie has asked Garrett, his best friend from college, to officiate the ceremony, though Cece can't imagine anyone more ill-suited for the task--an airport baggage handler haunted by a tragedy from his and Charlie's shared past. But as Cece spends time with Garrett, his gruff mask slips, and she grows increasingly uncertain about her future. And why does Garrett, after meeting Cece, begin to feel, well, human again? As a contagious stomach flu threatens to scuttle the wedding, and Charlie and Garrett's friendship is put to the ultimate test, Cece must decide between the life she's dreamed of and a life she's never imagined.

The events of that summer have long-lasting repercussions, not only on the three friends caught in its shadow but also on their children, who struggle to escape their parents' story. Spanning fifty years and set against the backdrop of a rapidly warming Montana, Dream State explores what it means to live with the mistakes of the past--both our own and the ones we've inherited.

Written with humor, precision, and enormous heart, both a love letter and an elegy to the American West, Dream State is a thrillingly ambitious ode to the power of friendship, the weird weather of marriage, and the beauty of impermanence.

Review Quotes

One of Lit Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2025

"Dream State is a delight...An exquisitely rendered novel about the vagaries of fate, and friendship, and love." --Alice McDermott, National Book Award winner and author of Absolution

"A moving, psychologically acute, formally surprising family saga...Sprawling and elegant...both old-fashioned and bracingly inventive." --Kirkus Reviews *starred review*

"A masterpiece. Dream State is a glittering, evocative achievement." --Adam Johnson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Orphan Master's Son

"Filled to the brim with life, Dream State is a wonder of character and craft." --Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less and Less is Lost

"Lush, immersive, devastating, and stunningly alive, Dream State did the thing the very best novels do: pulled me relentlessly into its characters, its setting, concerns, losses, and triumphs, only to let me loose again with a sharper, clearer vision of the world outside." --Lynn Steger Strong, author of The Float Test

"Funny and wild; some of the most beautiful writing that I have ever read." --Matthew Klam, author of Who Is Rich?

"Eric Puchner has populated his engrossing and deeply affecting novel with characters so complicated and sympathetic that we want--we need--to know how their lives will turn out, and what will happen to the glorious and fragile landscape they inhabit." --Francine Prose, author of Mister Monkey

"Eric Puchner's Dream State delivers everything I want in a novel: a love triangle, a moving friendship story, a delicious setting (including some of the best skiing scenes I've ever read in my life) and rumination about how we search for meaning in our lives...an absolute masterpiece." --Elin Hilderbrand, author of The Perfect Couple and Swan Song

"Dream State is a gorgeous exploration of time, grief, love, and the way that the commitments we make turn us into the people we become...brilliant." --Danielle Evans, author of The Office of Historical Corrections

"Dream State explores several monumental themes--love, family, identity, human transience, climate change--but always with a scrupulous attention to the fate of individuals, and always with a powerful sense of intimate connection. . .a remarkable achievement." --Andrew Motion, UK Poet Laureate 1999-2009

About the Author

ERIC PUCHNER is the author of the story collection Music Through the Floor, a finalist for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award; the novel Model Home, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award in Fiction; and a second short story collection, Last Day on Earth. His short stories and personal essays have appeared in GQ, Granta, Tin House, Best American Short Stories, and more. He has received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is an associate professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Baltimore with his wife, the novelist Katharine Noel, and their two children.