San Jose, California - A fractured Silicon Valley family tries to navigate a changing world: "In The Goodbye House, the landscape is so keenly observed, and the emotions so deeply felt, one cannot help but be drawn into this complex family drama. Coates writes with clarity and grace, solidifying his place in the canon of great California literature." ~ Michelle Richmond, author of Golden State

In the aftermath of the early 2000s dot-com bust, the people of San Josè, California, face a changing landscape of lost dreams and careers gone awry. It's in this setting that Katherine Watson, a forty-seven-year-old event planner and mother of two, tries to navigate an evolving world and a fractured home life, with each family member struggling to regain stability in ways that are similarly enriching, heartfelt, reckless, and rewarding. The characters fervently chase their dreams across Silicon Valley and beyond, from the gleaming office parks of Cupertino to a self-help seminar on the Las Vegas Strip and an underfunded high school theater production of The Tempest. The one element tying them all together is the house of the title, a 1950s tract home that once represented happiness and now holds the family close in its protective embrace, until, in the end, even this constant changes.

Lawrence Coates is professor of creative writing at Bowling Green State University. He has published three previous novels, all set in Northern California: The Blossom Festival, The Master of Monterey, and The Garden of the World. Coates has received the Miami University Press Novella Prize, the Western States Book Award for Fiction, the Nancy Dasher Award, the Barthelme Prize for Short Prose, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. 

$26.00 / 232 pages / Cloth ISBN: 978-0-87417-981-1 / Ebook ISBN: 978-0-87417-982-8