Somewhere between paradise and perdition ... Jack's wife has disappeared. She was in the car when they stopped for gas, he knows that much. He walked back from the counter, and then ... Jack can't remember. But Anne has gone. John Haskell's American Purgatorio is an extraordinary debut novel; haunting, comic and achingly poignant. It's a road trip into the heart of a country and a man, a travelogue of loss and redemption, a Pilgrim's Progress for a godless world. It will bring to mind Kurt Vonnegut, Herman Hesse, Jack Kerouac and Richard Ford, but at heart it is a journey, and a novel, like no other.