Paranoid yet judiciously reasonable, innocent yet calculating, strange yet strangely endearing, Emmet Barfield finds the world around him looming larger and larger the more he struggles to make his way within it. With Emmet as our guide, Force of Gravity transforms the world through a solitary consciousness until the reader's perceptions become as inverted as if seen through a modern version of Alice's looking glass. Emmet's world is a place where shopping in a market requires the cunning of a carefully considered crime, where a bustling city street in summer appears as desolate as a forgotten wasteland, where a stray cat adopted for company becomes as menacing as one's darkest foe, and where a mother and son riding a ski lift suddenly find themselves dizzy with the threat of death. Through his eyes, the world becomes newly alive with the terrible vividness and weird beauty of an undiscovered territory.

Force of Gravity: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Jones, R.S.

United States

Harper-perennial

William Addams is dying. Controlling, mercurial, and estranged from his family, he is consumed by the fear that he'll be abandoned by Henry and Susan, his closest friends, the only people on whom he can rely. 
What he wants is for their faithfulness to last until they take him home to his beloved house to die. But as William's condition worsens, it becomes apparent that his expectations of devotion and loyalty involve not simply a loving commitment but the virtual handing over of his friends' vitality and independence; indeed, William covets their very lives. 
Filled with penetrating insights and dazzling beauty, Walking on Air explores the shadowy, often disturbing parameters of devotion, demonstrating its inevitable limits as well as its astounding powers of transformation.

Walking on Air: A Novel

Records the obsessive details of one man's decline into insanity, in a novel that questions the tenuous hold all of us claim on reality and upon our very lives

Force of Gravity (Contemporary American Fiction)

Literary

Penguin??Books

In his new novel, Walking on Air, R. S. Jones has produced a gripping meditation on the bonds of love and trust in the face of shattering crisis. William Addams is dying. Controlling, mercurial, estranged from his family, he is consumed by the fear that he'll be abandoned as his disease careens out of his control. To avoid this, he focuses his considerable attention on Henry and Susan, his closest friends, the only people to whom his care can fall. It has always been William's desperate hope that the bonds of friendship will prove to be as durable as any family ties, yet he cannot rid himself of the dread that Susan and Henry will leave him. What he wants is for their faithfulness to last until they take him home to his beloved house to die. But as William's condition worsens, it becomes apparent that his expectations of devotion and loyalty involve not simply a loving commitment but the virtual handing over of his friends' vitality and independence; indeed, William covets their very lives.

Walking on Air

Houghton, mifflin, harcourt

Records the obsessive details of one man's decline into insanity, in a novel that questions the tenuous hold all of us claim on reality and upon our very lives

Force of Gravity

Viking Adult