Stephen Florida
‘Powerful and magnetic’ Guardian
‘Mind blowing’ Roxane Gay
‘Explosive’ Hanya Yanagihara
‘Funny and disturbing’ Lauren Groff
Meet Stephen Florida: college student, amateur wrestler, visionary, outsider.
Entering senior year, his sights are set on the championships. Every practice, every match, is a step closer to greatness, yet also a step further from reality. Profane, manic and tipping into the uncanny, this is Florida’s chronicle of loneliness, obsession, and the drive to leave a mark.
With echoes of The Art of Fielding and the film Foxcatcher, Gabe Habash’s daring, revelatory debut journeys into the mind of a young man teetering between control and rage, grief and elation, genius and insanity.
‘Powerful and magnetic, with a quality that suggests it has been worked over to strip it bare of ornamentation but still leave it with a rare beauty’ Guardian -
‘Mind blowing’ Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist -
‘A coming-of-age story with its own, often explosive, rhythm and velocity … This is a shape-shifter of a book, both a dark ode to the mysteries and landscapes of the American West and a complex and convincing character study’ Hanya Yanagihara, author of A Little Life -
‘Such a funny and disturbing and excellent book’ Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies -
‘Excellent … Gabe Habash takes us deep inside the disordered mind of a college wrestler. Welcome to the hall of fame of unreliable narrators’ BuzzFeed -
‘An unforgettable addition to the canon of great literary eccentrics. At once a chronicle of obsession, a philosophical treatise, and a deeply affecting love story, this singular novel is perhaps most profoundly an anatomy of American loneliness. Gabe Habash is a writer of powerful gifts, and this is a wonderful book’ Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You -
‘Utterly engrossing’ Dan Chaon, author of Ill Will -
‘Habash has created a fascinating protagonist in Stephen, a hard-driven athlete with a convincingly thoughtful mind … Just when you think you’ve got [him] pegged, he surprises you’ The New York Times Book Review -
‘Dizzyingly good’ Huffington Post -
‘Habash writes about the raw physicality of wrestling better than anybody this side of John Irving… A lively, occasionally harrowing journey into obsession’ Kirkus -
‘Wickedly good … exquisite … [Stephen Florida] is the taught, erratic, boundless contradiction of what it means to be alive’ Los Angeles Review of Books -
‘One of the most unforgettable characters in recent American fiction … starkly beautiful and moving … one of the best novels of the year’ NPR -
‘Spellbinding’ Toronto Star -