FIND IT on BOOKSHOP, GOODREADS, BARNES & NOBLE, AMAZON, and THIRTY WEST
This is my first novel. It’s about a place I love. Here are some nice things people I admire said about it:
“A vivid, beautifully written story. I didn’t want it to end.”
一 Alex G
“A charming novel about two brothers and their father attempting to undo lifetimes of quiet pain, together. Set in National Park, New Jersey and the adjacent Pine Barrens, How to Keep Time searches for magnificence in a place holy to me.”
一 Bud Smith, author of Teenager
“How to Keep Time is about the complexities of one’s family of origin and how childhood experiences unwittingly steer our path in adulthood. Kevin Kearney’s writing has heart. This book is charming, funny, and deeply moving.”
一 Shannon McLeod, author of Whimsy
I’ve been telling lots of people about it:
I wrote about running through the Pine Barrens as writing research for Necessary Fiction.
I talked to Dan at Weekend Guide and we nerded out about New Jersey.
Oh, and it’s about a family. Also New Jersey. Also some other things. Here’s what appears on the back of the book. It’s there to convince you to read it:
Every day, Mercer Moore was reminded that it was all ending. It was The End of Television, of Civility, of The Planet. But despite all the warnings, a new day arrived every morning. After a while, he became used to the sounds of the apocalypse. Some of them actually sounded pretty good.
And maybe that’s why this particular time doesn’t seem like the end. Sure, his wife Alejandra had been blunt. She hadn’t used the word “divorce,” but she had used “I” and “need” and “out,” all in a row.
Still. It just doesn’t feel like the end.
At a loss, Mercer reports Alejandra as a missing person and anxiously waits for news. In the meantime, his perpetually stoned father and born-again brother hope that a weekend at the family cabin in the Pine Barrens might bring him back to reality. But as each day passes without word from Alejandra, Mercer buries himself in the sprawling wilderness and its haunting mythology.
Surreal, heartbreaking, and subtly hilarious, HOW TO KEEP TIME is a novel about the way we’re all trying to navigate the end of the world, one lost weekend at a time.