Jack and Barry - Paperback

by Simon Petherick (Author)

"A poignant what-if tale that brings it all back." KEVIN RING, BEAT SCENE

It's December 1964 in Paradise Valley, Arizona. Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, who has just lost the Presidential election to Lyndon B Johnson, is driving alone one evening back to the house he shares with his wife, Peggy. On one side of the road, he sees a figure trudging back towards town and he stops to offer him a lift. So begins a highly unusual and emotional fictional friendship between Goldwater and the author, Jack Kerouac. Over the course of the next two days, the two men engage in a strange, wary exploration of each other's lives: one, an ebullient but bruised political animal; the other, a weary and almost defeated literary icon whose totemic novel, On The Road, was first published seven years before. Such an unlikely pairing brings about a soulful exploration of man's ambition and the bitter fruit it can deliver, set against the dramatic mountainous landscape of 1960s Arizona.

Author Biography

Simon Petherick is the author of four novels -- The Last Good Man, The Damnation Of Peter Pan, English Arcadia and Like Fire Unbound -- as well as a number of non-fiction titles and several filmscripts. He originally worked in London as a government writer at the UK's Central Office of Information and subsequently worked in both Europe and the Baltic States as a communications specialist. He has spent time in the United States, particularly in the southwestern states of Arizona and California. He currently lives in London.