A breakthrough novel from an American master about lost loves and the search for meaning in unlikely places.
Barry Gifford’s culminating work of fiction follows a man who leaves home and all that’s familiar, finds true love, loses it, and finds it again. His voyage is outward, among strangers, and inward into the fifth direction that is the Up-Down, in a sweeping, voracious human tale that takes no prisoners, witnesses extreme brutalities and expresses a childlike amazement. Here the route goes from New Orleans, to Chicago to Wyoming to Bay St. Clement, North Carolina, but the geography he is charting is always first and foremost unchartable.
The Up-Down is the eighth novel in the Wild at Heart novel cycle that began in 1990, the book that brings the Sailor and Lula story to its natural conclusion, and at the same time a new novel unlike any other Barry Gifford book, and thus the exception that proves the rule.
