Product Description
As new condition dark blue boards with gold front cover decoration and gold spine lettering contained in a fine condition non price-clipped color illustrated dust jacket.
Includes Author Dedication and Acknowledgments.
Signed by the author, Ron McLarty, with black pen on a new condition Indian River Literary Society bookplate which is not attached to the volume.
"This is a book that can do more than walk: it has a chance to be a breakout bestseller.
Smithy is an American original, worthy of a place on the shelf just below your Hucks, your Holdens, your Yossarians.
" - Stephen King.
"Riders who hop onto the back of Smithy Ide's bike and ride America awith him will cherish the journey.
I love this sad, funny, life-affirming novel.
" - Wally Lamb.
"Every decade seems to produce a novel that captures the public's imagination with a story that sweeps readers up and takes them on a thrilling, unforgettable ride.
Ron McLarty's The Memory of Running is this decade's novel.
Meet Smithson "Smithy" Ide, an overweight, friendless, chain-smoking, forty-three-year-old drunk who works as a quality control inspector at a toy action-figure factory in Rhode Island.
By all accounts, especially Smithy's own, he's a loser.
Then, within the span of one week, his beloved parents are killed in a car crash, and Smithy learns that his emotionally troubled, long-lost sister, Bethany, has turned up in a morgue in Los Angeles.
Unmoored by the loss of his entire family - Smithy had always hoped Bethany might return - he rolls down the driveway of his parents' house on his old Raleigh bicycle into an epic journey that will take him clear across the country.
As Smithy pedals across America - through New York City, St.
Louis, Denver, and Phoenix, to name a few - he encounters humanity at its best and worst and begins to remember an early life that too many beers have blotted out.
The baseball games, the home-cooked meals, the soothing presence of his salt-of-the-earth parents: none of it could transform the dark truth of his sister's madness.
The Memory of Running, McLarty's stunning debut as a novelist, heralds the arrival of a major new voice in American fiction.
And Smithy Ide - sad, sweet, and funny in spite of himself - is a character who will linger in your mind long after his hilarious, luminous, and extraordinary adventures have come to an end.
" - from the inner front jacket flap.
![[Signed] [First Edition] The Memory of Running: A Novel [SIGNED FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING] McLarty, Ron [Used - As new] [Hardcover]](https://r.kelkoo.com/resize.php?country=ca&merchantId=100567270&categoryId=5101&trackingId=96985762&width=auto&height=auto&image=https%3A%2F%2Fpictures.abebooks.com%2Finventory%2F32243036929.jpg&sign=AUYGaD8o97T151Fd2.ZmqstL.3Y_LPO83ZFCs8fF054-)
