Drive, The

On a hot August day at Vancouver airport, a distraught young man wanders into the Odyssey car rental agency, carrying a backpack full of beer and boxer shorts. Trevor Kelvin is in the midst of a serious crisis – at least in his own mind. His all-too-comfortable existence as a wannabe filmmaker has been disrupted by a single phone call from his Czech girlfriend.

In an attempt to get over her, and get his mojo back, Trevor rents a Dodge Neon and blazes down Highway 99, heading for California, equipped only with a semi-automatic pistol and his trusty plastic visor, and with a flea-ridden cat as his companion. As the drugs and the heartbreak kick in, his journey is increasingly fraught with peril, until the question is no longer whether Trevor will get over his girlfriend's infidelity but whether he'll get out alive.

An odyssey of Homeric proportions, told with a searing clarity reminiscent of Willy Vlautin or Patrick de Witt, The Drive has all the adventure and surrealism of Hunter S Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas but overlaid with heartfelt yearning and hope.

Tyler Keevil grew up in Vancouver and in his mid-twenties moved to Wales. He has published several books and his short fiction has appeared in a wide range of magazines and anthologies, including The Missouri Review, New Welsh Review, and PRISM: International. He has received a number of awards for his writing, most notably The Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors Prize, the Writers’ Trust of Canada / McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize, and the Wales Book of the Year People’s Prize. He is the Programme Director for the MA in Creative Writing at Cardiff University, and also teaches various extracurricular creative writing workshops and courses. Keevil’s debut novel Fireball was published in 2010 and was longlisted for Wales Book of the Year, shortlisted for the Guardian Not the Booker prize, and received the Media Wales People’s Prize 2011. His second novel The Drive was published to acclaim by Myriad in 2013. It was also longlisted for the Guardian Not the Booker prize and won the 2014 Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice Award. 2014 also saw the publication of Keevil’s short story collection, Burrard Inlet (Parthian), a story from which, ‘Sealskin’, was awarded Canada’s Journey Prize for the best short story of 2014 by the Writers’ Trust of Canada.