My Present Age - Hardcover

“It is compulsively readable...and presents us with wholly credible people. This is realism at its best....”
–Financial Times (U.K.)

“Vanderhaeghe’s considerable achievement in the novel is to explore the bleak landscape of contemporary relationships with uncommon insight and to create a memorable character who evokes our sympathy despite – or perhaps because of – his many frailties.”
–Globe and Mail

“[Vanderhaeghe is] a savagely funny writer....[He] has created the perfect vessel from which to launch his kamikaze sorties into contemporary life....He has created one of the more quirkily appealing characters in recent fiction.”
–Washington Post

“[A] masterful novel....Not a single false note mars the author’s graceful, precise depiction of the present era and its pitfalls.”
–ALA Booklist (U.S.)

“[Vanderhaeghe is] an author of palpable and protean gifts.”
–Boston Globe

“My Present Age is black comedy at its intimate and subversive best.”
–Douglas Barbour, Canadian Literature

“Very nearly unique among present-day novels of any sort: like Philip Roth and almost no one else, Vanderhaeghe has the ability to make you root for the protagonist without setting up straw men or women for the protagonist....”
–Greil Marcus, Express, Berkeley (U.S.)

“A fast, fluent and very funny novel....This is a hilarious, bleakly realistic comedy about modern life’s conformists and casualties. Or more precisely, about what can happen when it’s finally time to grow up – and you can’t.”
–Imagine Magazine (U.K.)

“[A] wonderful first novel....Brilliantly funny and very sad.”
–San Jose Mercury News

“Compassionate, humorous, and thematically important.”
–Bloomsbury Review (U.S.)

“A deftly done novel....[My Present Age] is astonishing in conception and execution....”
–San Diego Magazine

“An irresistible first novel....An achievement....”
–Spectator (U.K.)

“A beautifully sustained performance.”
–USA Today

Ed is punchy, unemployed, and on the wrong side of thirty. After his exasperated wife, Victoria, leaves him, Ed finds consolation where he has always found it, in his own rich and eccentric imagination. Pursued by the demons of his own obsession, Ed embarks on a quixotic quest to find Victoria. As he prowls the city's parking garages and motel strips, Ed begins a journey back into his past and is forced – most reluctantly – to confront the web of lies and self-deceptions he has woven to keep reality at bay – until even his fantasies start to turn against him. Keenly observant, humane, and darkly comic, My Present Age is an irresistible story about what happens when an Everyman becomes a casualty of modern life.