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Summary and Reviews of So Far Gone by Jess Walter

So Far Gone by Jess Walter

So Far Gone

A Novel

by Jess Walter
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  • First Published:
  • Jun 10, 2025, 272 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins—and in the propulsive spirit of Charles Portis' True Grit—comes a hilarious, empathetic, and brilliantly provocative adventure through life in modern America, about a reclusive journalist forced back into the world to rescue his kidnapped grandchildren.

Rhys Kinnick has gone off the grid. At Thanksgiving a few years back, a fed-up Rhys punched his conspiracy-theorist son-in-law in the mouth, chucked his smartphone out a car window and fled for a cabin in the woods, with no one around except a pack of hungry raccoons.

Now Kinnick's old life is about to land right back on his crumbling doorstep. Can this failed husband and father, a man with no internet and a car that barely runs, reemerge into a broken world to track down his missing daughter and save his sweet, precocious grandchildren from the members of a dangerous militia?

With the help of his caustic ex-girlfriend, a bipolar retired detective, and his only friend (who happens to be furious with him), Kinnick heads off on a wild journey through cultural lunacy and the rubble of a life he thought he'd left behind. So Far Gone is a rollicking, razor-sharp, and moving road trip through a fractured nation, from a writer who has been called "a genius of the modern American moment" (Philadelphia Inquirer).

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Reviews

BookBrowse Review

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For the most part, Walter convincingly steers between a crime caper and a dysfunctional family drama, and there's a wry sense of humor throughout that lightens the novel. And as characters go, Rhys is a lovable curmudgeon... In this convincing depiction of divided America and ailing families, Jess Walter holds out hope that the damage of the past can be dealt with and broken relationships might be restored.

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