Join us for an evening with Andrew Martin, who will read from his new novel, Down Time. An audience Q&A will follow. This in-person event will be cosponsored by WriterHouse and will be free and open to the public. We recommend arriving early for the best seating.
About the Book: A terribly funny and lovably louche novel about five friends growing older, if not always up, from Andrew Martin, author of Early Work and Cool for America.
Without Cassandra, Aaron would probably be dead. Fortunately, she won’t leave him—despite the drinking, flirting, solipsism, armchair socialism, overspending, infidelity, catastrophic depression, and disparate but increasingly frequent spells of drug- and booze-addled debauchery. Unfortunately, she might be reaching the end of her rope.
Cass and Aaron, like the other neurotic, ambivalent intellectuals in their orbit, are getting older. There’s Malcolm, with his own alcoholism and marginally more successful writing career; his partner, Violet, a doctor with little patience for both; Antonia, a teaching fellow whose book about ecocide may get her tenure at a prestigious university near Harvard Square—yes, that one. When Sam, a charming trust-fund punk at the center of this loose network, dies suddenly, and a global pandemic takes hold, all five must contend with the lives they’ve made: their desires and disappointments, habits and hang-ups, pathologies and addictions, and the possibilities of making art and being good as the earth whirls to its end.
Down Time marks the delightful return of Andrew Martin, the author of the pitch-perfect slacker classics Early Work and Cool for America. Compulsively readable and contagiously intelligent, this is a wryly comic social novel of settling down, selling out, growing up, and getting out that turns a terribly funny and hyper-literate eye on our most desperately guarded ambitions: to love and be loved, to know and be known, to stay sane, if only just.
About the Author: Andrew Martin is the author of the novel Early Work, a New York Times Notable Book of 2018, and the story collection Cool for America, longlisted for the 2020 Story Prize. His essays and stories have appeared frequently in The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, and Harper’s, as well as in The Yale Review, The Atlantic, McSweeney’s, The Times Book Review, and elsewhere. He teaches in Brooklyn and New Hampshire, and lives in New York City with his family.
Down Time will be released on March 10. To order the book, please see below for the New Dominion Bookshop book order form or call the shop at 434-295-2552.
"Down Time is effortlessly cool, wise, witty, and full of compassion—it should be blasted into space so that extraterrestrials, or our future descendants on Mars, know how privileged-but-adrift millennials lived and felt about being alive."
—Christine Smallwood
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