CALIFORNIAN

Ian Winn

RIGHTS AVAILABLE: All rights handled by the bks Agency

A towering achievement of literary fiction, Californian tells the sweeping, quasi-autobiographical tale of a budding young marine biologist who, days after graduating from the University of California, Santa Cruz, takes off on a drug-fuelled, cross-country road trip with his best friend, Q-Ball. It’s 1992, Nirvana is topping the charts and the world is about to go ‘online’.

We soon discover our hero is haunted by a transcendental near-death experience suffered the year prior while releasing his pet octopus back into the wild. He is now faced with the most important decision of his life: to continue on the path that he’s been walking since childhood, or to keep a sworn oath to commit what he's witnessed to writing. A gonzo tour de force, Californian is about taking chances, honour, the power of travel to change us, escapism, wilderness, confronting the hellfire of civilization, and the journeys that we all make to find out who we truly are. With jokes.

It's set in secretive, native, analogue California – from Emerald Bay to the Emerald Triangle, by way of a Hollywood A-lister’s grow-house and the Thai/Burmese DMZ. If Michael Pollan’s seminal How to Change Your Mind is the science, then Californian offers the art. It’s as much a deeply moving coming-of-age tale as it is a call to arms and an urgent assessment of our current ecological state.

Winn is Jonathan Franzen meets Terence McKenna meets David Foster Wallace: wonderfully absurd, wickedly funny, and able to pierce to the very core of what makes us most human – and most fallible. Redolent of Bonfire of the Vanities, steeped in the idiocy of youth, Californian is a road trip gone rogue, a chronicle of an age and an exploration of the unconscious biology behind our deepest urges.

This is the book that we need right now, and one that will resonate across generations – and for generations to come.

PRAISE FOR IAN WINN’S WRITING:

‘Loved it. It felt like a journey that Hunter S. Thompson might have made had he got all Silk Route. A book that holds the reader and takes him on a freaking great trip.’ — Tim Butcher, author of the #1 Bestseller Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart

‘Inventive, brilliantly realised characters ... One cannot help being won over by Winn’s enthusiasm and intellectual energy.’  — The Times

‘Fresh and funny, crazed and compelling, Winn writes with such energy and fizz that you can’t help but be pulled along on his journey. His voice is unique and he has created not just a world of his own, a genre of his own too. I was desperate to read more.’ — Russell Norman, bestselling author of Polpo, winner of the Waterstones Book of the Year

Originally from California, Ian Winn is a writer and Spoken Word poet with a degree in marine biology from UC Santa Cruz. Ian now lives in Devon with his wife, Cat, and their rescue terrier, Olive. He is also currently writing an irreverent, personal journey through the history of psychedelics.