Jack and Barry

'A poignant what-if tale that brings it all back.' KEVIN RING, BEAT SCENE 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.

Simon Petherick is the author of four novels - The Last Good Man, The Damnation Of Peter Pan, English Arcadia and Like Fire Unbound - as well as a number of non-fiction titles and several filmscripts. He originally worked in London as a government writer at the UK's Central Office of Information and subsequently worked in both Europe and the Baltic States as a communications specialist. He has spent time in the United States, particularly in the southwestern states of Arizona and California. He currently lives in London.