The Light Years: A Memoir

The summer after Chris Rush's first year at Catholic boarding school, a charismatic drug dealer named Valentine places a tab of LSD on his tongue, proclaiming, "This is a sacrament. You are one of us now." Chris is twelve years old.

Expulsion, predictably, follows. Barely a teenager, Chris flees the confines of suburban New Jersey and heads fro the acid-soaked landscape of the American West, where he is absorbed into the nascent sixties counterculture. Part of a shaggy assemblage of lowlifes, prophets, and fellow seekers, he spends his time in the desert coming to terms with his own troubled past and with a world on the brink of revolution - only to watch as the promises of his adolescence are stripped away by the sandstorm of the seventies.

A prayer for vanished friends, an odyssey studded with broken and extraordinary people, a joyful meditation on the individual and the earth itself - The Light Years is above all a paean to having lived, and to being alive.