K M Soehnlein burst into the literary scene with his best-selling début novel, The World Of Normal Boys. Now, he tackles the thorny landscape of fathers and sons, exploring the risks of connection and the impossibility of life without it.

Charming underachiever Jamie Garner is living a sexy slacker's life in San Francisco during the dot-com boom - avoiding his stalled careers as a radio producer, barely holding on to his relationship, but surrounded by fun loving friends. And then Jamie gets the call he always dreaded: Teddy, the father who never accepted him has died. It's time for the prodigal son to come home to the subdivisions and strip malls of suburban New Jersey to face the emotionally barren family he left behind years ago. What he learns on this vist will change his life in San Francisco forever.
Caught between the guilt he wants to shake and the grief he can't express, Jamie takes solace in a box of memorabilia he finds in the attic, marked "1960," the year his father spend in San Francisco but kept secret. Jamie is drawn to a moody, enigmatic photo of the stunning Dean Foster, his Dad's closest friend, who headed west then mysteriously disappeared. The cache of letters Teddy wrote to Dean reveals a friendship reminiscent of Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassidy and shows Jamie a father he never knew: an arist and poetic rebel, a man of secret passions and surprising revelations.

Determined to unlock the mystery of his father, Jamie seeks out the artist and poets, the free spirits and wild men mentioned in Teddy's letters. It's a journey that takes him deep into the subcultures of San Francisco, from the bohemian heyday of the Beat Generation through the Internet mania of his contemporary world, even as it unleashes something primal, hungry, and slightly dangerous in Jamie. As his search for the elusive Dean Foster turns ever more obsessive, undermining his friendships, his income, and his fidelity to his partner, Jamie is forced to decide what he is willing to risk in the pursuit of the truth.

At once lyrical and hard-hitting, K M Soenlein's second novel is a stunningly soulful love letter, one that could be written from father to son, from lover to lover, from the self to the deepest recesses of the heart.