Ask the dust - John Fante

Ask the Dust is a virtuoso performance by an influential master of the twentieth-century American novel.

It is the story of Arturo Bandini, a young writer in 1930s Los Angeles who falls hard for the elusive, mocking, unstable Camilla Lopez, a Mexican waitress.

Struggling to survive, he perseveres until, at last, his first novel is published.

But the bright light of success is extinguished when Camilla has a nervous breakdown and disappears .

and Bandini forever rejects the writer's life he fought so hard to attain.