Sugar street - Jonathan Dee

This propulsive and furious book is as fun to read as it is relentless and unsparing.

Deranged and faltering America, Jonathan Dee has your number.

--Joshua Ferris, author of The Dinner Party In Jonathan Dee's elegant and explosive new novel, Sugar Street , an unnamed male narrator has hit the road.

Rid of any possible identifiers, his possessions amount to $168,548 in cash stashed in an envelope under his car seat.

Vigilantly avoiding security cameras, he drives until he hits a city where his past is unlikely to track him down, and finds a room to rent from a less-than-stable landlady whose need for money outweighs her desire to ask questions.

He seems to have escaped his former self.

But can he? In a story that moves with swift dark humor and insight, Dee takes us through his narrator's attempt to disavow his former life of privilege and enter a blameless new existence.

Having opted out of his material possessions and human connections, the pillars of his new self - simplicity, kindness, above all invisibility - grow shakier as he butts up against the daily lives of his neighbors in their politically divided working-class city.

With the suspense of a crime thriller and the grace of our best literary fiction, Dee unspools the details of our unlikely hero's former life and his developing new one in a drumbeat roll up to a shocking final act.

Dee has been compared by the Wall Street Journal to authors such as Jonathan Franzen and Jennifer Egan for his expansive, contemporary, social novels; Sugar Street is a leaner, more personal, but still uncannily timely look at the volatile America of today.

A risky, engrossing and surprisingly visceral story about a white man trying to escape his own troubling footprint and start his life over.