The hottest state

With disarming emotional honesty, Ethan Hawke's first novel captures that agitated, electric moment between youth and adulthood when every new feeling becomes a source of mystery and wonder, and every experience seems overlaid with staggering possibility or certain doom.

Hawke's narrator will be disconcertingly familiar to anyone who has ever felt the fierceness of young love: Meeting Sarah catapults William into a world of shame and ardor and unspeakable tenderness, and in six head-spinning months he comes to know both the restless, overmastering ache of first love and the wild and ruinous grief it leaves behind.