Ride - Andrew Lafleche

"Andrew Lafleche's Ride, like a sharp new switchblade, has a dangerous weight to it. Troy is high risk, with sex, drugs, and crime, and he's giving his life the finger. Ride is highway speed and echoes Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting." -Gerald Arthur Moore, author of Shatter the Glass

Set in the early 2000s in St. Catharines, Ontario, high school is over, an ex-girlfriend is pregnant, and Troy Brinkman is spiralling out of control. Having just moved out of his parent's home, Troy enters a landscape of limitless moral entropy where everybody in his social circles drinks copious amounts of alcohol, snorts mountains of cocaine, and swallows as many Ecstasy pills as they can get their hands on.

When he's not seething for his next high, Troy cruises parties, strip-clubs, and bars for action in a desperate attempt to avoid coming to terms with his best friend's attempted suicide. In this binge-life, Troy recognizes his impending doom and tries to renew feelings for his ex-girlfriend, Danielle, his sole through-line that connects Troy to who he was before. It's this struggle which may lead to Troy's self-destruction.

Ride is the millennial's contemporary version of the classic 1960s counterculture novel and readers will catch familiar whiffs of the nihilism and loneliness in the darkest writings of Thompson, Bukowski, and Jack Kerouac in Lafleche's gritty 'sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll' world of excess, self-gratification, and black comedy.