Jack and Barry
It’s December 1964 in Paradise Valley, Arizona. Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, who has just lost the Presidential election to Lyndon B Johnson, is driving alone one evening back to the house he shares with his wife, Peggy. On one side of the road, he sees a figure trudging back towards town and he stops to offer him a lift.
So begins a highly unusual and emotional fictional friendship between Goldwater and the author, Jack Kerouac.
Over the course of the next two days, the two men engage in a strange, wary exploration of each other’s lives: one, an ebullient but bruised political animal; the other, a weary and almost defeated literary icon whose totemic novel, On The Road, was first published seven years before. Such an unlikely pairing brings about a soulful exploration of man’s ambition and the bitter fruit it can deliver, set against the dramatic mountainous landscape of 1960s Arizona.
“A poignant what-if tale that brings it all back.” KEVIN RING, BEAT SCENE
Simon Petherick has lived in London for many years. His novel English Arcadia takes as its subject matter the left-wing Westminster political party of the 1940s, Common Wealth. His third novel, The Damnation of Peter Pan, focuses on the fantasies of JM Barrie in The Kensington Gardens. Simon has been a part of London s fabric all his adult life: arranging rock concerts in Hyde Park, running the fashion house Hardy Amies in Savile Row, writing and publishing books from an office in Soho.
