All Day Is A Long Time

This is raw, semi-autobiographical fiction at its most painfully honest' Observer 'Brilliant, lyrical, hilarious, heartbreaking' Cristina Garcia David is only fourteen when he first tries crack cocaine. He is instantly hooked, and spends the next decade fighting his way out of jail and rehab. Though he reaches a tenuous sobriety, it is only when he takes a literature class at the local community college that something within him ignites. Set on Florida's Gulf Coast, All Day Is a Long Time is a spectacular account of what it takes to return from the brink to the world around us. In this unforgettable debut, David Sanchez demonstrates the importance of hope, and the redemptive power of the written word. 'A wonder, an important, essential new voice' Justin Torres

About the Author :
David Sanchez is the recipient of a Michener Creative Writing Fellowship at the University of Miami, a PEN America Writing for Justice Fellowship, and a Tin House Scholarship in 2018. He lives in Tampa, Florida. All Day Is A Long Time is his first novel.

Review :
This book has it all . . . 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 poured all of himself into this debut, a terrifying, moving and profound exploration of the liminal space between addiction and connection. With unflinching, razor-sharp precision, David Sanchez guides us through the labyrinthine heart of addiction and recovery. Wild, brutal, and tender, All Day is a Long Time is a novel of devastating truth and beauty. 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 beautiful poem of a book. 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's hero looks the devil in the eye and returns to tell a death-defying tale of redemption. 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 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. 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. A semi-autobiographical novel of trauma and addiction offers hope for narrator, author and reader...This is raw, semi-autobiographical fiction at its most painfully honest... in David's quieter moments, when 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... Literature has saved him.