Twenty-two year old Tom Macklin drifts from job to job and place to place, living out of his tent and his car. But his siblings need him home to sell the house they grew up in—the house their mother died in one year ago. His misadventures—lost in Idaho, bent in Colorado, and nearly burned in Iowa—and the myriad of people he encounters force him to face his family, his past, and who he is now. The road becomes increasingly hostile and Tom is running out of money, means,and options.
An adventure of both place and spirit, A Place to Call Home is part family saga, part travelogue, and part bildungsroman. Readers have compared it to Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Camus’s The Stranger. As Tom figures out what to do he begins to appreciate the woman that was his mother, and the siblings that are his last chance.
Excerpts of the novel have twice received partial selection for the John Schultz/Betty Shiflett Scholarship; another excerpt was a semifinalist in the Guild Writing Complex’s Fiction Open; a chapter was published in Hair Trigger 26, which a film student optioned for a short film.
The excerpt, "Colorado," is published in Annalemma, Issue 3 www.annalemma.net
Duffer is actively seeking representation for the novel.
To read an excerpt from the opening of the book, click here.
To read an excerpt of Tom and his siblings waiting for their mom to die, click here.
Though he hesitates to confirm this, Duffer is working on two bigger projects that appear to be novels. An excerpt from the tentatively titled After It Happened was performed at the 2nd Story Festival. If the second project had a name it would be Mess.