"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
"David Sanchez has poured all of himself into this debut, a terrifying, moving, and profound exploration of the liminal space between addiction and connection. Sanchez evokes the minute-to-minute suspense of early sobriety unlike anyone I've ever read, with an extraordinary honesty and poetry. Sanchez is a literary cartographer, mapping an intricate overlay of his young narrator's psychological states and Florida's real beaches and swamps, those coastlines in continuous revision." — Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove
"David Sanchez's first novel—brilliant, lyrical, hilarious, heartbreaking—is the definitive handbook to hell and back. I haven't read anything as toughly vulnerable since Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son. A stunning debut." — Cristina García, author of Dreaming in Cuban
"This book has it all, not only does the harrowing story grip you from the start, but the voice is so insightful, so poetic, so absolutely alive to the world, that you won't be able to put it down. David Sanchez is a wonder, an important, essential new voice." — Justin Torres, author of We the Animals
"An addiction novel that redeems the genre...Sanchez’s autofiction has its own distinctive feel." — Los Angeles Times
"In his rich, visceral debut novel, All Day Is a Long Time, David Sanchez sketches a portrait of addiction and young adulthood that wrestles with the limitations of recovery narratives." — Shelf Awareness
"All Day is a Long Time is the most terrifying and beautiful exploration of how addiction is made. David Sanchez has written a gulf coast classic." — Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division and Heavy
"This journey into the mind of a young addict is like nothing I’ve ever read—a terrifying, and often ecstatic, struggle for survival. It’s an obsessive world of chemical equations and philosophical conundrums, an attempt to reckon with a breathless descent into madness. Sanchez’ hero looks the devil in the eye and returns to tell a death-defying tale of redemption." — Chris Rush, author The Light Years
"David Sanchez has written the rarest kind of novel. His subject matter, spanning so many aspects of contemporary American pain, is incredibly important, but it is his beautifully constructed sentences which make the narrative sing." — Garrard Conley, author of Boy Erased
"Striking…unstoppable, writing with an undeniable power...the narrator is a memorable creation, vulnerable and self-aware. A captivating debut." — Kirkus Reviews
"Wonderfully evocative of the seedy underbelly of Florida’s Gulf Coast, Sanchez's tale follows David as he cycles through recovery, relapses, homelessness, and rehab, yielding a stunningly written depiction of rock bottom. The prose flows like the water that surrounds the coast, occasionally crashing over the reader with arresting descriptions of drug-induced paranoia…Even when describing horrors, Sanchez’s rich, stylish prose is a treat to read. This is a brilliant, harrowing, and unflinching depiction of a journey to the brink and back." — Alexander Moran, Booklist
"Sanchez’s shimmering debut uses rapid-fire prose and dark humor to sketch the hardscrabble coming-of-age of a boy on the Florida Gulf Coast…Sanchez is a daring, clever writer…This gritty and engrossing account of a man traversing into and out of hopelessness will stay with readers." — Publishers Weekly
"Invigorated by the bite of authenticity...what makes this debut stand out are its fascinating philosophical qualities. The depths that Mr. Sanchez depicts may be specific to the experiences of the most down-and-out addicts; the moving journey back into the world has universal application." — Wall Street Journal
"Writing like this is a passport to a different country: different rules, different business hours, different food and horizons. It’s dark but awfully appealing. We run toward it, then slow for the crash, wondering who will die and how. Another reason books like this continue to work is the clear agony of the “messenger,” a mix of compulsion and duty to share the journey, the depravity, the possibility of redemption… What’s so clarifying about All Day Is a Long Time is how it asks us to think about what any of us really needs in the end." — Los Angeles Times
"Sanchez’s debut novel All Day is a Long Time is...about addiction, about the search for footing in a world which offers no gravity...What does good art provide or what does it feel like it’s providing, if not exactly this, this sure footed gravity?" — Chicago Review of Books
"This is raw, semi-autobiographical fiction at its most painfully honest…Sanchez’s writing has a fine, almost hallucinatory quality, it’s also a thought-provoking portrait of the vulnerability present in family life and how easily that can turn into damage." — The Guardian
"This book has it all, not only does the harrowing story grip you from the start, but the voice is so insightful, so poetic, so absolutely alive to the world, that you won't be able to put it down. David Sanchez is a wonder, an important, essential new voice."
"David Sanchez has written the rarest kind of novel. His subject matter, spanning so many aspects of contemporary American pain, is incredibly important, but it is his beautifully constructed sentences which make the narrative sing."
"David Sanchez's first novel—brilliant, lyrical, hilarious, heartbreaking—is the definitive handbook to hell and back. I haven't read anything as toughly vulnerable since Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son. A stunning debut."
"David Sanchez has poured all of himself into this debut, a terrifying, moving, and profound exploration of the liminal space between addiction and connection. Sanchez evokes the minute-to-minute suspense of early sobriety unlike anyone I've ever read, with an extraordinary honesty and poetry. Sanchez is a literary cartographer, mapping an intricate overlay of his young narrator's psychological states and Florida's real beaches and swamps, those coastlines in continuous revision."
"An addiction novel that redeems the genre...Sanchez’s autofiction has its own distinctive feel."
"This journey into the mind of a young addict is like nothing I’ve ever read—a terrifying, and often ecstatic, struggle for survival. It’s an obsessive world of chemical equations and philosophical conundrums, an attempt to reckon with a breathless descent into madness. Sanchez’ hero looks the devil in the eye and returns to tell a death-defying tale of redemption."
"In his rich, visceral debut novel, All Day Is a Long Time, David Sanchez sketches a portrait of addiction and young adulthood that wrestles with the limitations of recovery narratives."
"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."
"All Day is a Long Time is the most terrifying and beautiful exploration of how addiction is made. David Sanchez has written a gulf coast classic."
An addiction novel that redeems the genre...Sanchez’s autofiction has its own distinctive feel.
David, the narrator of this harrowing tale, is like Quentin in The Sound and the Fury—"drawn to the past, sleepwalking into the future.” To call this a novel of addiction would be like calling The Sound and the Fury a novel of regret—yes, each is that, but each is also so much more. This is a book about Florida—big and dumb and corrupt and magical. It is a book in which nothing happens, until terrible things happen. This book is a way for David to see the animals in his brain, a way to recede into that hazy spot, where, as Sanchez writes, "I both am and am not." In the end, somehow Faulkner saves him, somehow his mother’s tears—tears he never understood—save him. Somehow each janky, random encounter saves him, gets him to the place—this place—where this book could be written. This beautiful poem of a book.
08/01/2021
In this coming-of-age age tale from Sanchez, winner of Michener and PEN America Writing for Justice fellowships, 14-year-old David runs away from his Florida Gulf Coast home in pursuit of a girl and ends up trying crack cocaine. He is instantly under its sway, his life ripped apart for a decade, but then encountering Dante, Melville, and Hemingway in a literature class at a community college changes everything.
2021-11-10
A young man in Florida battles drug addiction in this striking first novel.
“Everything happened fast for years,” says the narrator of Sanchez’s debut novel, and it’s a remarkable understatement. The book starts off with the narrator, 14 years old at the time, traveling via bus from Tampa to Key West, hoping to spend time with a girl he has a crush on. He immediately encounters an older man who plies him with drugs and, along with a woman, molests him. Things don’t get much better for the narrator, who over the next several years struggles with drug addiction, spending “a couple months on the street, a couple months in jail, a couple in the psych or the halfway and back on the street again. This job, that job, always only for a couple months or weeks before something happened. Sober for a few months and then not.” He hits rock bottom so often the term loses its meaning, though eventually he gets help after experiencing a seizure, moving into a halfway house, enrolling in community college, and trying to reconcile with his estranged parents. Sanchez’s novel has the structure and tenor of an addiction memoir, though his narrator would hate to hear that (“Memoirs are whiny,” he sneers), particularly at the beginning; it takes the author a little time to find his rhythm. But once he does, he’s unstoppable, writing with an undeniable power that only occasionally gets away from him. (There are a few lines—“Everything was time soup in my head. Dumplings of memories and noodley thoughts”— that don’t quite land.) Still, the narrator is a memorable creation, vulnerable and self-aware, and Sanchez does a mostly excellent job describing the monstrous effects of drug addiction in a way that’s harrowing but never exploitative. Despite a few intermittent stumbles, it’s a compelling book.
A captivating debut.
