It’s nighttime and the air is cold. It’s brisk as it washes over bare skin, a reminder that it’s winter. And as you walk beneath the clear midnight sky, the moon casts a shadow ever so slightly, it reminds you that you’re alive.

At the age of twenty-eight, the Narrator has taken only three steps in life: one for being cynical, one for being bitter, and one for being jaded. But an extraordinary thing happens after a life-saving encounter with a stranger leads to an adventure of self-discovery and reawakening to the world. The journey brings the Narrator into the lives of a past love, a pregnant neighbor, and a churning river that nearly claims the Narrator’s life. Are the relationships that develop after the accident mere coincidence, or part of something greater, and perhaps, driven by fate?

thirty-six hours of self-imposed exile is a novel that poses the question, “What does it mean to be alive?” Through the changing of the Boston seasons, this novel explores the cyclical nature of the human state, from apathy to understanding, and from love to loss and back again.