Telephone - by Percival Everett (Paperback)

About the Book

"Zach Wells, a laconic geolist-slash-paleobiologist, has the trappings of a comfortable life, yet is not contented. He's expert in the geological history of a cave in the Grand Canyon, but less so where his wife and daughter are concerned. And when his daughter develops unusual vision problems and has a seizure, the world of this family of three crumbles. Powerless in the face of his daughter's slow deterioration, Wells finds a note asking for help tucked into a jacket he's ordered online, and sets off on a quixotic rescue mission"--From back cover.

Book Synopsis

FINALIST FOR THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE IN FICTION

An astonishing new novel of loss and grief from "one of our culture's preeminent novelists" (Los Angeles Times)

Zach Wells is a perpetually dissatisfied geologist-slash-paleobiologist. Expert in a very narrow area--the geological history of a cave forty-four meters above the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon--he is a laconic man who plays chess with his daughter, trades puns with his wife while she does yoga, and dodges committee work at the college where he teaches.

After a field trip to the desert yields nothing more than a colleague with a tenure problem and a student with an unwelcome crush on him, Wells returns home to find his world crumbling. His daughter has lost her edge at chess, she has developed mysterious eye problems, and her memory has lost its grasp. Powerless in the face of his daughter's slow deterioration, he finds a mysterious note asking for help tucked into the pocket of a jacket he's ordered off eBay. Desperate for someone to save, he sets off to New Mexico in secret on a quixotic rescue mission.

A deeply affecting story about the lengths to which loss and grief will drive us, Telephone is a Percival Everett novel we should have seen coming all along, one that will shake you to the core as it asks questions about the power of narrative to save.

Review Quotes

"Sometimes, almost indifferently, one of [Percival Everett's] novels turns out to be truly exceptional and memorable, and confuses me in the best possible way. . . . Everett's most recent novel, Telephone, is one of these standouts. . . . Everett pulls off a gently tremendous technical feat with the accumulated little slips out of the present situation. . . . For this reader, the reveries and exits accumulated such that the final and longest slide into the wilderness made the turn to the closing pages sad, affecting and marvelous."--Rivka Galchen, The New York Times Book Review

"God bless Percival Everett, whose dozens of idiosyncratic books demonstrate a majestic indifference to literary trends, the market or his critics."--The Wall Street Journal

"Like watching a skilled juggler execute a six-ball fountain, the experience of reading Telephone is astonishing."--Los Angeles Times

"A spellbinding, heartbreaking tale."--Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Percival Everett is the author of thirty books, including So Much Blue, Assumption, Erasure, and I Am Not Sidney Poitier. He has received the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction. He lives in Los Angeles.