Peter Jernigan's life is slipping out of control. His wife's gone, he's lost his job and he's a stranger to his teenage son. Worse, his only relief from all this reality - alcohol - is less effective by the day. And when the medicine doesn't work, you up the dose. And when that doesn't work, what then? (Apart from upping the dose again anyway, because who knows?) Jernigan's answer is to slowly turn his caustic wit on everyone around him - his wife Judith, his teenage son Danny, his vulnerable new girlfriend Martha and, eventually, himself - until the laughs have turned to mute horror. Shot through with gin and irony, Jernigan is a funny, scary, mesmerising portrait of a man walking off the edge with his eyes wide open - wisecracking all the way.

 "[Has a] jumpy, boozy, post-modern ironic belligerence.... This is a profoundly sorrowful book, one that lingers, unbidden, in the heart."  —  The New York Times Book Review

"Brilliantly handled... At once harrowing and hilarious, an artful chronicling of one man's free-fall into an exhilarating, devouring nihilism."   —  San Francisco Chronicle

David Gates is an American journalist and novelist. His first novel, Jernigan (1991), about a dysfunctional one-parent family, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1992 and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. This was followed by a second novel, Preston Falls (1998), and two short story collections, The Wonders of the Invisible World (1999) and A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me (2015). Gates is also a Guggenheim Fellow.