Less

PROBLEM: You are a fifty-year-old, unsuccessful author. Your lover of the previous nine years, who is now engaged to someone else, sends you a wedding invitation in the mail. Saying no would seem like defeat, while saying yes would make everything too uncomfortable. You have a stack of incomplete literary invites from all around the globe on your desk.

QUESTION: How do you make plans to go out of town?

ANSWER: All of them are accepted.

if Arthur Less is who you are.

This starts Arthur Less's fantastic journey around the globe in eighty days, taking him to Mexico, Italy, Germany, Morocco, India, and Japan while separating him by thousands of miles from the issues he won't confront. What may go wrong, if anything?

Well, Arthur will unintentionally sign himself up as the (only) writer-in-residence at a Christian Retreat Centre in Southern India, nearly die in Berlin, barely make it to a Moroccan ski chalet during a Sahara sandstorm, and arrive in Japan too late to see the cherry blossoms. Between are science fiction enthusiasts, insane professors, emergency departments, celebrities, physicians, ex-lovers, and the last person he wants to see on Earth—a desert island in the Arabian Sea. During that time, he will turn fifty. He imagines the second part of life trailing behind him, like to the second stage of a rocket. It's going to be his first love. And it's going to be his last.

Less presents a writer at the height of his abilities unveiling our shared human comedy. It is a love story, a satire of the American abroad, and a meditation on time and the human heart by an author The New York Times has praised as "inspired, lyrical," "elegiac," "ingenious," as well as "too sappy by half."