Sugar Street

In Jonathan Dee's elegant and explosive novel, Sugar Street, an unnamed male narrator has hit the road. Rid of any possible identifiers, his possessions amount to $168,548 in cash stashed in an envelope under his car seat.

Vigilantly avoiding security cameras, he drives until he hits a city where his past is unlikely to track him down and finds a room to rent from a less-than-stable landlady whose need for money outweighs her desire to ask questions. He seems to have escaped his former self. But can he?

In a story that moves with swift dark humor and insight, Dee takes us through his narrator's attempt to disavow his former life of privilege and enter a blameless new existence. Having opted out of his material possessions and human connections, the pillars of his new self--simplicity, kindness, above all invisibility--grow shakier as he butts up against the daily lives of his neighbors in their politically divided working-class city.

With the suspense of a crime thriller and the grace of our best literary fiction, Dee unspools the details of our unlikely hero's former life and his developing new one in a drumbeat roll up to a shocking final act.

Dee has been compared by the Wall Street Journal to authors such as Jonathan Franzen and Jennifer Egan for his expansive, contemporary, social novels; Sugar Street is a leaner, more personal, but still uncannily timely look at the volatile America of today. It's a risky, engrossing and surprisingly visceral story about a white man trying to escape his own troubling footprint and start his life over.