A woman moving calamitously into middle-age; a musician taking in a friend with terminal cancer; a failed actor moving to the country: cynical, unreliable, sinking into middle age or alcoholism, dealing with physical decline or mediocrity, Gates’s characters are a dark reflection of our own urban and suburban lives. Terrifyingly self-aware, overcome by the burdens of the human condition, they find their impulses pulling them away from comfort into distraction or catastrophe. But wherever it is they’re going – and sometimes it’s nowhere fast – they won’t go gently.
Relentlessly inventive, by turns comical, caustic and tragic (and often all three together) but always moving, the novella and ten short stories which make up
A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me reinforce David Gates as ‘a true heir to both Raymond Carver and John Cheever.’ (New York Magazine).
About the author
David Gates lives in Missoula, Montana, and Granville, New York. He teaches at the University of Montana, and in the Bennington Writing Seminars, and was an editor at Newsweek, where he specialised in music and books. He is the author of two novels, Jernigan and Preston Falls, and the story collection The Wonders of the Invisible World.Jernigan was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award. Gates’s short stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Esquire, Paris Review and Granta.
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