Sashara

Denny Harlan is twenty-two years old and has lived his entire life in a four-room house on Mockingbird Lane in Moreno Valley, California. He works a dead-end warehouse job. He has no friends. He has a mother who loves him completely and a life that feels like it's being lived inside a very small box, and he cannot articulate to either of them why the box is slowly suffocating him. At two in the morning, scrolling through Craigslist because he cannot sleep, he finds a listing for an RV. The price is impossible. The description is minimal. The interior photographs have a quality he cannot name — something that makes him feel, looking at them, like he is being looked at in return. He messages the seller. The response comes back in four minutes. When he arrives at the storage facility to view the vehicle, everything in his life pivots. The RV — a 1998 Fleetwood Bounder — is old and worn and somehow more alive than anything he has ever encountered. She has a name: Sashara. And she is waiting for him with the particular patience of something that has been waiting a very long time for exactly this person to arrive. Denny is a novel about the slow realization that sometimes the thing you think is saving you is the thing that is claiming you, and about the particular loneliness that leads us to hand over our keys — literal and metaphorical — to the first thing that offers us the feeling of being home. It is told by a man who has never belonged anywhere, who buys an RV on impulse, and who begins to understand, one mile at a time, that the best escape routes have no exit. For readers of Stephen King's Christine**, Paul Auster, and dark magical realism — a love story between a lonely man and the machine that has decided he is hers.**