There's a Road to Everywhere Except Where You Came from - by Bryan Charles (Paperback)

About the Book

"There's a Road to Everywhere Except Where You Came From" is the memoir of a young Midwestern man struggling to carve out a life as a writer, and to find meaning, or at least a job, in his new and alien landscape of New York City. In a voice at once coolly detached and utterly confident, we follow Bryan Charles's journey navigating love, work, and family, from the streets of Manhattan to the upper floors of corporate America. This is a gripping meditation on the self, ricocheting between the multitudes and solitude, and between the industrial-turned-residential spaces of Brooklyn and the towers of the World Trade Center, where his life takes an unexpected turn. Charles's story is a spare, honest, and often hilarious narrative of expectation and loss, and of the ordinary becoming the extraordinary.

Book Synopsis

There's a Road to Everywhere Except Where You Came From is the memoir of a young Midwestern man struggling to carve out a life as a writer, and to find meaning, or at least a job, in his new and alien landscape of New York City. In a voice at once coolly detached and utterly confident, we follow Bryan Charles's journey navigating love, work, and family, from the streets of Manhattan to the upper floors of corporate America. This is a gripping meditation on the self, ricocheting between the multitudes and solitude, and between the industrial-turned-residential spaces of Brooklyn and the towers of the World Trade Center, where his life takes an unexpected turn. Charles's story is a spare, honest, and often hilarious narrative of expectation and loss, and of the ordinary becoming the extraordinary.

Review Quotes

"A sneakily disturbing, disarmingly profound, casually devastating memoir, taut and adept, that cracked me up even at its saddest moments, and broke my heart almost without my quite noticing." --Michael Chabon

"This is the book I can't forget...Full of insightful, transcendent regular-guy moments and bad decisions, it didn't make me like the author, but it knocked me on my ass." --Library Journal (starred review)