Pricing
Paperback $16.00
eBook $9.99
More books by Brian Allen Carr
Description
During a week-long suspension from school, a teenage transplant to impoverished rural Indiana searches for a job, the whereabouts of his vanished drug-addicted guardian, and meaning in the America of the Trump years.
Seventeen-year-old Riggle is living in rural Indiana with his uncle and uncle’s girlfriend after the death of both of ...
During a week-long suspension from school, a teenage transplant to impoverished rural Indiana searches for a job, the whereabouts of his vanished drug-addicted guardian, and meaning in the America of the Trump years.
Seventeen-year-old Riggle is living in rural Indiana with his uncle and uncle’s girlfriend after the death of both of his parents. Now his uncle has gone missing, probably on a drug binge. It’s Monday, and $800 in rent is due Friday. Riggle, who’s been suspended from school, has to either find his uncle or get the money together himself. His mission exposes him to a motley group of Opioid locals—encounters by turns perplexing, harrowing, and heartening. Meanwhile, Riggle marks each day by remembering the mythology his late mother invented for him about how the days got their names.
With amazing directness and insight, Carr explores what it’s like to be a high school kid in in the age of Trump, a time of economic inequality, addiction, confederate flags, and mass shootings. A work of empathy and insight, Opioid, Indiana pierces to the heart of our moment through an unforgettable protagonist.
Media
“The precision of the images in this novel illuminate every scene like the water around a lighthouse . . . Eerily prescient for the increasing volatile divide in the United States.”
—Idra Novey, author of Ways to Disappear, for Sip
“Brian Allen Carr beautifully cultivates the classic motif of the loss of the shadow to underline, disguised as a speculation about the future, the nightmarish features of our dystopian present.”
—Yuri Herrera, author of Signs Preceding the End of the World, on Sip
“Opioid, Indiana is narrated by an orphan, who from the outside could be called broken, yet his days are lit by sideways kindnesses and glimmery wonder. Full of gorgeous language and wild insights, by the end it seems possible that everything is going to be okay. I burned through his world with him.”
—Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
“Brian Allen Carr’s Opioid, Indiana is a propulsive, haunting novel taking the reader through the week of a family on the fringes of collapse. Carr’s spare prose and ability to write about struggle in such a powerful way will surely mark him as an important writer to watch. I loved it! ”
—Brandon Hobson, National Book Award Finalist and author of Where the Dead Sit Talking
“With refreshing, authentic teenage bluntness, orphaned narrator Riggle sees right through our contemporary American self-deceptions—while also unraveling the mysteries of his own wounded family. Unpretentious and genuine, this poignant coming-of-age novel doesn't shy away from the question: How will today's young people make sense of the broken world we've left them? ”
—Chandler Klang Smith, author of The Sky Is Yours
“Opioid, Indiana shot straight through me and left pieces of itself in my heart and my gut. It’s like Catcher in the Rye but even better. A smart, funny, sweet-sad book with a totally irresistible narrator. ”