The Last Timeout

Wade Hollis arrives at the building at four in the morning. He parks in the third space rather than the first, because the first is under a security camera. He has been the head coach in Buffalo for nine years and has said perhaps four hundred words into a microphone in all that time.

He has Tourette syndrome. Nobody in the building mentions it. The local broadcast cuts to a replay when it runs long during a press conference - a convention nobody ever wrote down, in the way a family develops a rule about a topic without ever holding a meeting.

The league would like him to make a video about it. They have been asking for six years.

The Last Timeout follows one season: a winning streak, a jury summons, a woman who has spent forty-four years in Buffalo declining to care about football, an eighty-one-year-old father in the Texas Panhandle who has never once named the thing, and a documentary crew who came for a story and found a man watching tape.

It ends in a dome, three points short, with the clock running and no way left to stop it.

A novel about work, about what holding still costs, and about the difference between being celebrated and being left alone.

From the author of No One in Munich, The Beautiful Farewell and The Near Miss.