'One to watch in 2020' - Irish Times

'An extraordinary debut for an extraordinary new talent' -- Frederick Barthelme, author of There Must Be Some Mistake

Nicholas and his wife April live in a remote cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains with their four-year-old son, Jack. 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.

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 his wife Stephanie feel entirely unready to be parents but his mother and father have issues of their own. And April's mother, Tammy, is driving across the country to claim her grandson.

Experiencing a few traumatic days in the minds of each family member, Alan Rossi's 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. It is a gripping, affecting and extremely accomplished debut.

When a couple are killed on an isolated road in North Carolina they leave behind an orphaned son and grieving relatives who must decide between them who will be his caretaker.

About the Author
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.

Reviews
Mountain Road, Late at Night is a wondrous thing and deserves to win prizes . . . an extraordinary achievement . . . Rossi's narrative burns off the page - I kept thinking of it as a stream of lights, of cat's eyes, illuminating each new stretch of the road it travels, offering partial but transformative glimpses of what is to come impossible to forget -- Nina Allan, author of The Dollmaker and The Rift
An enormously engaging novel. We don't so much read it as live it with these troubled characters and the child, Jack, robbed of his parents by the shocking car crash on a lonely mountain road. This is a complex, deeply moving novel, given completely to the interrogation of its witnesses. An extraordinary debut for an extraordinary new talent -- Frederick Barthelme, author of There Must Be Some Mistake
Written in chapters that alternate between the character's perspectives, this is a subtle examination of the effects of trauma and sudden loss, as well as a tense conflict between different views of parenting, what's in the best interests of an orphaned child, and how it is influenced by one's own upbringing. Through sharply drawn characters, Rossi achieves a clear-eyed and poignant view of a family in crisis * Sydney Morning Herald *
I was really moved by this extraordinary stream of consciousness accessing the deepest layers of four flawed people facing an unimaginably terrible situation. Compassionate and profound, this is the kind of novel that puts even difficult things into perspective -- Isabel Costello, The Literary Sofa
This gripping debut from Alan Rossi has a tragedy as its catalyst. When the parents of Nicholas and April are killed in an accident, the narrative is unfurled through the perspectives of family members who must ensure that life goes on * Happy Mag *
A minor miracle: a Buddhist instruction manual that is also a deeply compelling novel -- David Shields, author of Salinger
At the centre of this fascinating but sometimes gruelling story is the fate of a four-year-old boy, Jack, whose parents are killed in a car crash. Who should he live with? Who can best financially provide for him? Where will he be happiest? * Herald Sun *



Book Information
ISBN 9781529002355
Author Alan Rossi
Format Hardback
Page Count 256
Imprint Picador
Publisher Pan Macmillan
Weight(grams) 380g
Dimensions(mm) 226mm * 144mm * 32mm