"Twelve teens who have prepared their entire lives for an ancient life-or-death game must finally come to terms with its arrival, forming tenuous alliances and killing each other for the chance to be the last one standing and the winner of the ultimate prize: the ability to save a select group of people from the end of the world"--
Apparently, the Messiah is alive. He is living in New York. Sleeping with men. Impregnating women. Euthanasing the dying, healing the sick. Defying the government and condemning the holy. If you were to meet him and he changed your life, would you come around to believing?
One of the most celebrated and controversial authors in America delivers his first novel—a sweeping chronicle of contemporary Los Angeles that is bold, exhilarating, and utterly original.Dozens of characters pass across the reader's sight lines—some never to be seen again—but James Frey lingers on a handful of LA's lost souls and captures the dramatic narrative of their lives: a bright, ambitious young Mexican-American woman who allows her future to be undone by a moment of searing humiliation; a supremely narcissistic action-movie star whose passion for the unattainable object of his affection nearly destroys him; a couple, both nineteen years old, who flee their suffocating hometown and struggle to survive on the fringes of the great city; and an aging Venice Beach alcoholic whose life is turned upside down when a meth-addled teenage girl shows up half-dead outside the restroom he calls home.Throughout this strikingly powerful novel there is the relentless drumbeat of the millions of other stories that, taken as a whole, describe a city, a culture, and an age. A dazzling tour de force, Bright Shiny Morning illuminates the joys, horrors, and unexpected fortunes of life and death in Los Angeles.