Lonely Places is a sweeping, intimate coming-of-age novelthat follows the fierce, tender, and ultimately tragic bond between four Manhattan prep-school boys—Thomas, Atlas, Eli, and Paulie—whose friendship becomes the defining gravity of their youth. Narrated a decade later by Thomas, now an aspiring but struggling writer, the novel retraces the years that forged (and fractured) them: the classrooms and rooftops where they first learned to love one another, the cross-country road trip that stitched them together, the secrets that slowly unraveled them, and the fault lines of a tragedy that echoes long into adulthood.
Spanning a decade of friendship, grief, and queer longing, Lonely Places, at its core, is an elegy to the echoes of adolescence and a story about the things, the people, and the parts of ourselves we lose with it. It explores the ways we try to convince ourselves we are fine, even as we come undone. It asks what it means to love people who are breaking, what it means to hold secrets that calcify in the dark, and how we learn to carry the versions of ourselves we left behind.
Ultimately, it is a novel about grief—for a friend, for adolescence, for the person you once believed you might become.