by Jess Walters
My sister Laura and her partner David heard Jess Walter speak at an author event and said he was just as funny in person as is his voice as a fiction writer. So Far Gone takes place in western Washington in the years after Donald Trump was first elected in 2016. Retired journalist Rhys Kinnick drops off the grid and out of sight at his grandfather’s old sheep ranch way back in the woods, and a few years later is shocked back into the “real world” by the sight of his almost unrecognizable grandchildren standing on the front porch of his cabin. Driven by his love for them and for his missing daughter, he launches into a search that takes him into that other-worldly world of right-wing Christian Nationalism, which happens to be the faith of his grandkids’ father, Rhys’ son-in-law, whom he last saw when he threw a punch at his daughter’s Thanksgiving celebration several years earlier.
Sounds heavy, but trust me, hilarity ensues.