Well - by Matthew McIntosh (Paperback)

About the Book

Set among the working class of a Seattle suburb called Federal Way, this original debut novel extols the lives of a large cast of characters lost in various modes of darkness and despair.

Book Synopsis

Well marks the astonishing debut of an author with a singular and unflinching voice and vision. The denizens of this brilliant novel are boxers, bartenders, and data-entry technicians, fishermen, mothers, and exotic dancers, would-be kings and queens of the punk rock scene, sparemen and gunmen and soon-to-be dead men. What binds them is the Well-that dark barren region of the human heart and mind. Whether desperately alone or struggling to come together, they grapple with dangerous compulsions and heartrending afflictions, searching for relief, transcendence, or a vehicle up into the light they know must exist. They search in sex, drugs, and violence, and in visions of apocalypse and creation, dreams of angels and killers and local sports championships. Compact, finely wrought, and powerfully charged, Well is a mesmerizing tour de force that will establish Matthew McIntosh as a bold and progressive new voice of American fiction.

Review Quotes

"Daringly structured ... McIntosh shows a remarkable facility for capturing different voices, the way people speak and think in their most private moments, the circular, stammering way that inarticulate people describe pivotal moments of their lives....Extremely involving and interesting."

"A brilliant meditation of the way in which human beings invest in various sourts of meanings--a game, a body (your own or someone else's), a drug--and how this investment never quite delivers what you thought it would. It's a verbally pyrotechnic, formally exciting, and emotionally devastating book."

"At last we've found the young writer who will carry us into the new millennium. Matthew McIntosh brilliantly displays the world of today with bleak love, desperate hope, and ruthless compassion. The top writer of his generation."

"The humanity of the people sings off the page. They are not characters in a book, but rather living beings with all the hopes, dreams, fears, loves, hates, illusions, and rationalizations that are part of the human dilemma. A book that still resonates in my heart."