Extraordinary Adventures
A Novel
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4.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Edsel Bronfman works as a junior executive shipping clerk for an importer of Korean flatware. He lives in a seedy neighborhood and spends his free time with his spirited mother. Things happen to other people, and Bronfman knows it. Until, that is, he gets a call from operator 61217 telling him that he’s won a free weekend at a beachfront condo in Destin, Florida. But there’s a catch: the offer is intended for a couple, and Bronfman has only seventy-nine days to find someone to take with him.
The phone call jolts Bronfman into motion, initiating a series of truly extraordinary adventures as he sets out to find a companion for his weekend getaway. Open at last to the possibilities of life, Bronfman now believes that anything can happen. And it does.
A large-hearted and optimistic novel, Extraordinary Adventures is the latest from the New York Times bestselling Daniel Wallace.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Wallace's strained new novel, 34-year-old Edsel Bronfman leads an ordinary life until the day he receives a phone call inviting him to spend a weekend in Destin, Fla., as the guest of a condo community. There's only one catch: the invitation is for two, and Bronfman, who leads a circumscribed existence (to say the least) in Birmingham, Ala., doesn't know any available women. And to make matters worse, he only has 79 days to find one before the offer expires. Improbable as it seems, that one phone call sends Bronfman's orderly existence spinning off its axis. In short order, he has his apartment broken into, is threatened by the drug dealer who lives next door, joins the YMCA, attends an art exhibit where he is asked by two women to expose himself, goes with his dotty mother to visit the motel room where he was conceived, attends the funeral of a high school friend, and, most important of all, meets Sheila McNabb, who just might be Destin-worthy (if Bronfman doesn't screw things up). Bronfman is one of those eccentric loners that one meets more often in fiction than in real life. It's difficult to invest in his adventures because it's difficult to believe in him. Wallace (Big Fish) is a master of domestic whimsy, but here his exploration of the joys of quotidian life seems disappointingly forced.
