Overview

A city, three lives, four decades, poems, drugs, booze, hippies, love, lust, loss - just keep moving. Some relationships linger across decades and continents, no matter how much individuals change. The links between Patrick, Joanna, Daisy, and San Francisco, though stretched, never snap. San Francisco and the Bay Area are at the heart of this story about three lives evolving over 40 years. When Patrick discovers San Francisco in the summer before the Summer of Love, he is old enough to be drafted for Vietnam, but too young to buy beer. His innocence extends from women to psychedelics. The city will tutor him. Joanna is a Bolinas poet, Daisy her 10-year-old daughter. In a world of lost families, they invent a simulacrum. The city is not just streets and seascapes, but events and the people drawn to and shaped by it. It is North Beach and the Mothers of Invention, City Lights Bookstore and LSD, Hammett's after-midnight fog and the Golden Gate. Patrick leaves and returns, leaves and returns to his default base. Patrick, Joanna, and Daisy their histories are entwined with the history of the city. Those were perilous, shifting times, and they rowed their boat through the heart of them.

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9781936364428

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Reviews

"""[V]ibrates with the Summer of Love and moves forward into its aftermath and its ultimate impact... Libraries and readers seeking San Francisco-centric novels steeped in Bay Area culture, neighborhoods, and norms will find The Coast compelling and thoroughly engrossing."" --Midwest Book Review ""Enright's style is so delightfully casual and conversational that you might miss [his] perceptive and penetrating comments...Enright tackles serious issues but he's a deft yarn-spinner and will seduce you at once."" --Providence Journal ""In prose as seamlessly seductive and evocative as Hermann Hesse's, John Enright depicts in The Coast a San Francisco that has disappeared from this earth to be replaced by a simulacrum where ghosts walk through virtual realities; yet it holds out the promise of a city again poised to rise from ashes, one where real people live, love, die, and, perhaps, are resurrected. Enright's Bay Area becomes a gritty land of enlightenment not unlike Siddartha's mystical Nepal."" --Michael Joyce, author of Remedia and Light in its Common Place"

Author Information

John Enright was born and raised in Buffalo, New York. After serving stints in semipro baseball and the Lackawanna steel mills, he earned his degree from City College of New York while working full-time at Fortune, Time, and Newsweek magazines. He spent 26 years in the South Pacific, most of them in American Samoa where he taught at American Samoa Community College. He is the author of the acclaimed Jungle Beat Mysteries series. His book of poems, 14 Degrees South, won the inaugural International Literature Competition. Today he lives in Owensboro, Kentucky.

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