All Day Is a Long Time

The General Fiction Gold Medal Winner of the 2022 Florida Book Awards

A Finalist for the Twenty-Third NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award

"Urgent, sharp and expansive...this exceptional debut is not a cautionary tale about the perils of drugs, but it certainly is the story of so many people right now, and it somehow leaves us with hope. What’s more, the rare if dark gems found along its ocean floors, all sharp and brittle and made of base desire, let us glean a part of what’s at the heart of addiction itself." —Tommy Orange, The New York Times

For fans of Denis Johnson and Ocean Vuong: A captivating, searing, and ultimately redemptive debut novel about coming of age on Florida’s drug-riddled Gulf Coast and the enigmatic connection between memory and self

David has a mind that never stops running. He reads Dante and Moby Dick, he sinks into Hemingway and battles with Milton. But on Florida’s Gulf Coast, one can slip into deep water unconsciously; at the age of fourteen, David runs away from home to pursue a girl and, on his journey, tries crack cocaine for the first time. He’s hooked instantly. Over the course of the next decade, he fights his way out of jail and rehab, trying to make sense of the world around him—a sunken world where faith in anything is a privilege. He makes his way to a tenuous sobriety, but it isn't until he takes a literature class at a community college that something within him ignites.

All Day is a Long Time is a spectacular, raw account of growing up and managing, against every expectation, to carve out a place for hope. We see what it means, and what it takes, to come back from a place of little control—to map ourselves on the world around, and beyond, us. David Sanchez’s debut resounds with real force and demonstrates the redemptive power of the written word.  

David Sanchez is a writer from Tampa, Florida. He is the recipient of a James A. Michener Fellowship from the University of Miami and a PEN Writing for Justice Fellowship. His debut novel All Day Is a Long Time (HarperCollins 2022) has won the Florida Book Award Gold Medal, an International Latino Book Award, and the Mary Frances Hobson Prize.