The Luckiest Man Alive

Bubba Ray Jenkins is the kind of man who fixes things. Fences, feelings, friendships - if something's broken in Willow Creek, Alabama, Bubba Ray is already on his way over with the right tool and a warm smile. So when he finds his grandfather's pocket watch in the attic after his mother's funeral and discovers it can carry him backward through time, he does exactly what anyone might expect him to do.

He gets to work.

A word smoothed over here. A stumble prevented there. A friendship saved, a wound closed, a goodbye finally said. What could go wrong?

Everything, as it turns out. Everything, slowly, and then all at once.

The Luckiest Man Alive is a darkly comic Southern Gothic novel about the catastrophic cost of good intentions - about what happens when a man with boundless love and no sense of scale is handed a tool with no limits. As Bubba Ray's well-meaning repairs ripple outward through the decades, he finds himself standing in Munich in 1923, in the New Mexico desert in 1945, and in a version of his own hometown he no longer quite recognizes - all while remaining absolutely convinced that he's just one more small fix away from making everything right.

Funny, devastating, and quietly profound, this is a novel about grief and guilt and the particular American faith that every problem has a solution if you care enough to find it. And about what it costs - to the world, and to a man - when that faith turns out to be both completely sincere and completely wrong.

For fans of The Midnight Library, Recursion, and A Man Called Ove.