An Oprah's Book Club Pick and one of the most anticipated books of the year for the Independent, BBC.com and Lit Hub.

A love triangle. A family story told over fifty years. A book about the magnetic pull of friendship.

Cece is in love. She has arrived early at her in-laws' beautiful lake house in Salish, Montana, to finish planning her wedding to Charlie, a cardiac anaesthesiologist with a brilliant future.

When Charlie asks Garrett, his best friend from college, to officiate the ceremony, Cece can't imagine anyone less appropriate for the task. After all, Garrett, a depressed baggage handler at the local airport, doesn't believe in marriage. But as she spends time with him and his gruff mask slips, she grows increasingly uncertain about her future, leading to an impulsive decision that will alter the three friends' lives forever - the events of that summer reverberating across fifty years and spanning generations.

Simultaneously following in the tradition of the great American novel and reinventing it from within, Dream State is at once an elegy to the endangered West, a study of the unholy catastrophe of marriage and a tender ode to the enduring beauty of friendship.

Warren Ziller moved his family to Southern California in search of a charmed life, and to all appearances, he found it: a gated community not far from the beach, amid the affluent splendor of the 1980s. But the Zillers' American dream is about to be rudely interrupted. Warren has squandered their savings on a bad real estate investment, which he conceals from his wife, Camille, who misreads his secrecy as a sign of an affair. Their children, Dustin, Lyle, and Jonas, have grown as distant as satellites, too busy with their own betrayals and rebellions to notice their parents' distress. When tragedy strikes, the Zillers are forced to move to Warren's abandoned housing development in the desert. In this comically bleak new home, each must reckon with what's led them there and who's to blame--and whether they can summon the forgiveness needed to hold the family together.
With penetrating insights into modern life and an uncanny eye for everyday absurdities, Eric Puchner delivers a wildly funny, heartbreaking, and thoroughly original portrait of an American family.

Includes a new story, "Body Language"
Now in paperback, Eric Puchner's celebrated debut collection, a finalist for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, established him as one of our most brilliant and promising new literary voices.
Writing from an impressive range of perspectives -- men and women, children and adults, immigrants and tourists -- Puchner deftly exposes the dark, tender undersides of his characters with arresting beauty and precision. Here are people fumbling for identity in a dehumanizing world, captured in moments that are hilarious, shocking, and transcendent, sometimes all at once. Unfailingly true, surprisingly moving, and impossible to forget, these stories make up an extraordinary and strikingly original collection.