Patrick Dacey

Harvard Book Store and Mass Humanities welcome PATRICK DACEY, author of the short story collection We’ve Already Gone This Far, for a discussion of his first novel, The Outer Cape. 

About The Outer Cape

Robert and Irene Kelly were a golden couple of the late ‘70s—she an artist, he a businessman, each possessed by dynamism and vibrancy. But with two young boys to care for, Irene finds herself confined by the very things she’d dreamed of having. And Robert, pressured by Irene’s demands and haunted by the possibility of failure, risks the family business to pursue a fail-safe real estate opportunity.

Twenty years later, their now-grown sons, Nathan and Andrew, are drawn back to confront a fateful diagnosis. As they revisit the Cape Cod of their childhood, the ghosts of the past threaten to upend the tenuous peace of the present.

In The Outer Cape, Patrick Dacey delivers a story of four people grappling with the shadow of infinite possibility, a book in which chasing the American dream and struggling to survive are one and the same.

Praise

"Patrick Dacey is an old-school storyteller, a pure novelist reminiscent of another era. The greats come to mind reading The Outer Cape—Updike, Didion, Stone, Yates—but his voice is wholly his own." —Daniel Torday, author of The Last Flight of Poxl West

"The Outer Cape feels downright prophetic. Patrick Dacey adroitly channels the desperation of Americans left behind by the devastating consequences of the real estate bust, the new economy, and the Iraq War. His empathy for the ill-fated everyman and his nimble prose evoke the best of Carver and Beattie and Wolff and Ford, but with a unique energy and acute sensitivity to the travails of our troubled era. Written in a voice that is somehow both unflinching and compassionate, The Outer Cape is as timely as it is utterly compelling." —Ed Tarkington, author of Only Love Can Break Your Heart