Dream State
On sale
8th May 2025
Price: £20
‘A book of tears, laughter, longing, regrets and filled to the brim with life . . . a wonder’
ANDREW SEAN GREER, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less
‘Dream State delivers everything I want in a novel’
ELIN HILDERBRAND, author of The Perfect Couple
‘A masterpiece’
ADAM JOHNSON, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Orphan Master’s Son
‘Brilliant’
DANIELLE EVANS, author of The Office of Historical Corrections
Cece is in love. She has arrived early at her in-laws’ beautiful lake house in Salish, Montana, to finish planning her wedding to Charlie, a cardiac anaesthesiologist with a brilliant future.
When Charlie asks Garrett, his best friend from college, to officiate, Cece can’t imagine anyone less appropriate for the task. Garrett doesn’t believe in love, much less marriage. But as she spends time with him and his gruff mask slips, her long-held expectations for her life with Charlie begin to crumble, leading to an impulsive decision that will alter the three friends’ lives forever – the events of that July reverberating through marriage, parenthood and across generations.
Simultaneously following in the tradition of the great American novel and reinventing it from within, Dream State is at once a study of the unholy catastrophe of marriage and a tender ode to the devastating beauty of friendship.
ANDREW SEAN GREER, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less
‘Dream State delivers everything I want in a novel’
ELIN HILDERBRAND, author of The Perfect Couple
‘A masterpiece’
ADAM JOHNSON, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Orphan Master’s Son
‘Brilliant’
DANIELLE EVANS, author of The Office of Historical Corrections
Cece is in love. She has arrived early at her in-laws’ beautiful lake house in Salish, Montana, to finish planning her wedding to Charlie, a cardiac anaesthesiologist with a brilliant future.
When Charlie asks Garrett, his best friend from college, to officiate, Cece can’t imagine anyone less appropriate for the task. Garrett doesn’t believe in love, much less marriage. But as she spends time with him and his gruff mask slips, her long-held expectations for her life with Charlie begin to crumble, leading to an impulsive decision that will alter the three friends’ lives forever – the events of that July reverberating through marriage, parenthood and across generations.
Simultaneously following in the tradition of the great American novel and reinventing it from within, Dream State is at once a study of the unholy catastrophe of marriage and a tender ode to the devastating beauty of friendship.
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Reviews
Dream State is a delight. Every scene, every character, every sentence, is infused with Eric Puchner's intelligence and wit. An exquisitely rendered novel about the vagaries of fate, and friendship, and love
Dream State is a masterpiece. A glittering, evocative achievement
A book of tears, laughter, longing, regrets and filled to the brim with life. Dream State is a wonder of character and craft
Funny and wild, here is some of the most beautiful writing that I have ever read
Dream State is a gorgeous exploration of time, grief, love, and the way that the commitments we make turn us into the people we become . . . brilliant
Dream State explores several monumental themes - love, family, identity, human transience, climate change - but always with a scrupulous attention to the fate of individuals, and always with a powerful sense of intimate connection . . . a remarkable achievement
Lush, immersive, devastating, and stunningly alive, Dream State did the thing the very best novels do: pulled me relentlessly into its characters, its setting, concerns, losses, and triumphs, only to let me loose again with a sharper, clearer vision of the world outside
Dream State delivers everything I want in a novel: a love triangle, a moving friendship story, a delicious setting (including some of the best skiing scenes I've ever read in my life) and rumination about how we search for meaning in our lives . . . an absolute masterpiece
Eric Puchner has populated his engrossing and deeply affecting novel with characters so complicated and sympathetic that we want - we need - to know how their lives will turn out, and what will happen to the glorious and fragile landscape they inhabit