After Gregory

Peter Gregory, a 35-year-old high school English teacher with an ex-wife and kids, tries to drown himself in the Ohio River. Failing to manage even that, he decides to hitch a ride east, fleeing the state and escaping accusations of rape and murder. As he assumes and discards aliases along the way, he believes that he can begin again, a fresh start—but the past has a habit of catching up with all of us, no matter how fast we run.

"This literary and existential mystery-within-a-novel may remind readers of the fiction of Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, and other authors who chart the modern American search for identity. . . . An intellectual wordsmith's whodunit." —Kirkus Reviews

"Wright's fifth novel, a dark, allegorical parable about the links between identity, the past and the need to write, reads like a cross between Paul Auster's The Music of Chance and an episode of the '50s TV series The Millionaire. . . . This novel—told mostly in the unusual second-person singular—is about writing as a way to reconcile our past with who and what we become; it's Wright's brief but stirring conclusion on this subject that makes the book so special." —Publishers Weekly

Austin Wright (1922-2003) was a novelist, literary critic, and professor of English at University of Cincinnati. He was the author of Tony and Susan.