The Ecstasy

It’s 1979, end of an era. Having come up among delinquents, drinkers and Catholics, seventeen-year-old Road Doughty is tough, smart, funny and unflappable. But on the threshold of adulthood, there’s one thing he still can’t quite process or a woman named Karma’s subtle, unwitting betrayal that occurred three years ago, following his freshman year in high school. Narrated in the first person, with equal parts homage to the headlong prose of Jack Kerouac and the life of John Donne, THE ECSTASY is a rangy, passionate, challenging novel of ideas and love, freedom and fate, poetry and sex, which celebrates the upstart in all of us.