Mountain Road, Late at Night

(Paperback)

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A striking, compulsive and immensely powerful debut novel about what happens when tragedy strikes a family. Nicholas and his wife April live in a remote cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains with their four-year-old son. They keep their families at a distance, rejecting what their loved ones think of as 'normal'. In the early hours of a Wednesday morning, they are driving home from a party when their car crashes on a deserted road and they are killed. This is the story of what happens after the tragedy. As the couple's grieving relatives descend on the family home, they are forced to decide who will care for the child Nicholas and April left behind. Nicholas's brother, Nathaniel and sister-in-law aren't ready to be parents but his mother and father have issues of their own. And April's mother is driving across the country to claim her grandson. Experiencing a few traumatic days in the minds of each family member, Alan Rossi's debut, Mountain Road, Late at Night is a taut, nuanced and breathtaking look at what we do when everything goes wrong, and the frightening fact that life carries on, regardless. A gripping, affecting and extremely accomplished debut.

Reviews

An extraordinary debut for an extraordinary new talent -- Frederick Barthelme, author of There Must Be Some Mistake
Compassionate and profound, this is the kind of novel that puts even difficult things into perspective -- Isabel Costello, The Literary Sofa
Through sharply drawn characters, Rossi achieves a clear-eyed and poignant view of a family in crisis * Sydney Morning Herald *
Gripping * Happy Mag *
A minor miracle . . . a deeply compelling novel -- David Shields, author of Salinger

Author Bio

Alan Rossi was born in 1980 in Columbus, Ohio. His fiction has appeared in Granta, the Atlantic, Missouri Review, Conjunctions, Agni, and Ninth Letter, among others. His novella Did You Really Just Say That To Me was awarded the third annual New England Review Award for Emerging Writers, and he was the New England Review/Bread Loaf Scholar for 2017. He is also the recipient of a Pushcart Prize for his story 'Unmoving Like a Mighty River Stilled', and an O. Henry Prize for 'The Buddhist'. He lives in South Carolina with his wife and daughter. Mountain Road, Late at Night is his first novel.