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Ride by Andrew Lafleche AZW

From the award winning poet and author of No Diplomacy comes this unsettling debut novel, Ride, by Andrew Lafleche.

High school is over, an ex-girlfriend is pregnant, and Troy Brinkman is spiralling out of control. After walking out of a forced therapy session arranged by his mother, Troy’s only ambition is to lose himself in whatever the next high may be. Oversexed and angry, Troy narrates the often-violent exploits consequential of a peer-group of druggies, while desperately trying to forget his best friend’s attempted suicide that he believes is his own fault.

Set in Niagara in the early 2000’s, this novel is a raw confrontation of sexuality and addiction in a modern coming-of-age narrative.

Troy has moved out of his parent’s home and enters a landscape of limitless entropy where everybody drinks copious amounts of alcohol, snorts mountains of cocaine, and once Ecstasy is discovered, swallows as many pills as they can get their hands on. When he’s not seething for his next high, Troy cruises parties, strip-clubs, and bars for action in a desperate attempt to avoid coming to terms with Casey’s hanging. In this binge-life, Troy recognizes his impending doom and tries to renew feelings for his ex-girlfriend, Danielle - his only lifeline and the sole through-line that connects Troy to who he was before he became who he is.

It’s this struggle which may lead to Troy’s own destruction.

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