All Day Is A Long Time
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- 3,99 €
Publisher Description
This is raw, semi-autobiographical fiction at its most painfully honest' Observer
'Brilliant, lyrical, hilarious, heartbreaking' Cristina García
David is only fourteen when he first tries crack cocaine. He is instantly hooked, and spends the next decade fighting his way out of jail and rehab. Though he reaches a tenuous sobriety, it is only when he takes a literature class at the local community college that something within him ignites.
Set on Florida's Gulf Coast, All Day Is a Long Time is a spectacular account of what it takes to return from the brink to the world around us. In this unforgettable debut, David Sanchez demonstrates the importance of hope, and the redemptive power of the written word.
'A wonder, an important, essential new voice' Justin Torres
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sanchez's shimmering debut uses rapid-fire prose and dark humor to sketch the hardscrabble coming-of-age of a boy on the Florida Gulf Coast. The troubled David tells of Xanax blackouts in high school classrooms, shooting up oxycodone and meth at home, running away at 14 to pursue a girl, and a series of stints in the Palm Beach County jail, before and after he turns 18. Flush with "energy, rage, and terrible longing," David burns through a series of behavioral therapists and rehab facilities and trades sex for meth. The school wrestling team becomes a temporary distraction before a full-on return to drug stupors and near-lethal blackouts. The frenetic scenes are saturated with panic, stress, and simmering desperation, and the narration can be overly gloomy; its saving grace arrives when David, already a casual reader of Descartes, takes a community college literature course, and new possibilities open up for him. Sanchez is a daring, clever writer: a passage on the particulars of smoking crack is as vivid as David's sober awakening and his yearning to make amends with family. This gritty and engrossing account of a man traversing into and out of hopelessness will stay with readers.
