Love Is the Drug

Wonderfully empathic, smartly comic, and wickedly insightful, this captivating debut novel maps the progress of an unforgettable young woman endeavoring to mend a broken heart and find salvation.

""Hello, my name is Tyler Tracer and I am falling apart. I am twenty-four years old, and I have no ability whatsoever to choose an occupation or a hair color.""

Meet Tyler, the singularly irresistible and straight-talking heroine of Sarahbeth Purcell's touching first novel. An incurable romantic, Tyler's chief obsessions include music, list-making -- and David, the man who broke her heart. Despite an exhaustively detailed list of reasons for why she should just forget about David once and for all -- including (but by no means limited to) chronic illness, terminal self-absorption, and geographical inaccessibility -- Tyler remains hopelessly hooked on him. Hence the wild ride she embarks upon in the wake of her father's death, a ride that takes her from her hometown in Tennessee to sunny Los Angeles, all in hopes of saving David from his ominous take on life.

This hilarious and dark cross-country expedition finds our young heroine negotiating the universally perilous terrain of sex, love, and relationships with uncommon verve, wit, and more than a little recklessness. Along the way, Tyler discovers, among other things, the uniquely redemptive powers of roadkill, the fact that enduring love tends to blossom in the most unexpected and unlikeliest places, and, above all, that nothing can stop her from making her own rules and mapping out her own life. Not even herself.

A joyous triumph of a debut to which readers will respond with a sense of instant recognition, Sarahbeth Purcell's "Love Is the Drug" spins a story of bold living and loving that crackles with energy and innovation.