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Great Disasters

A Novel

Author Grady Chambers
Read by Zachary Chastain
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On sale Sep 30, 2025 | 5 Hours and 56 Minutes | 9798217345656
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For fans of Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School and Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, Great Disasters is a stirring debut novel about six young men coming of age, and the enduring friendships that make us who we are—even as our paths diverge.

This is the story of how we became. I write those words but remain uncertain what they mean. . . . Drinking was a part of it. But as much as it was drinking, it was Ryan’s love for Jana.
And as much as it was Ryan’s love for Jana, it was equally the war.

In the early 2000s in Chicago, six young men start high school. Though they’ve been friends since boyhood, their high school years set them on new paths: The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan begin, along with the protests against them; Ryan falls in love but struggles to hold onto it; and he and the others learn to lose themselves in alcohol. With each passing year—as they enter college or the military, then the world beyond; form new relationships with partners and children; and navigate shifting loyalties to a changing country—the narrator feels the group breaking further apart and finds himself asking: What does it mean to move forward, both with and without one another?

Exploring the beauty, hope, and humor that can be found even in moments of deep loneliness and devastation, Grady Chambers’ Great Disasters moves between memories of high school and early adulthood to consider friendship, first love, patriotism, protest, addiction, and more. An exquisitely written, profoundly moving debut novel, Great Disasters is an intimate portrait of disasters big and small, personal and political—and the ways the two are intertwined—and the announcement of a stunning new voice in American fiction.
In stark and subtle prose, [Chambers] flushes out present-day male loneliness from the places it hides: alcoholism, nomadism, and persistent fixations on long-ago romances.—Booklist, Starred Review

A master grasp on language and movement…. a gift of breathtaking prose brimming with empathy and soul.—Debutiful, Best Book of the Month

Tender and taut…. offers a message about love, loneliness, and the inescapable fervor of war that never ceases to resonate…. Remarkable.—Chicago Review of Books, Best Book of the Month

Grady Chambers, poet, has written a tender, beautifully observed debut novel, an empathic recollection of becoming, of love and what it is made of.  In Chambers’ kind voice is wonder at it all. Great Disasters is great fiction. —Christine Schutt, author of Pure Hollywood

Great Disasters is an elegiac and moving first novel. Chambers writes beautiful, precise prose that carefully narrates the story of his characters’ high school years: reckless and callow, but also formative and tender. With great compassion and an evocative sense of place and history, Chambers captures the intricate ways adulthood is shaped by the long shadows of adolescence. —Dana Spiotta, author of Wayward

Great Disasters is at once earnestly old-fashioned and quietly contemporary. Its narrator’s account of his cohort of mostly privileged Chicago boys as willfully unselfconscious drinkers from middle school to middle age seems to track America’s own dismal arc from 9/11 to the ascension of Trump. But the narrator’s focus, for better and for worse, is always himself: his fears and sadnesses regarding his own meekness and inauthenticity, and the distance he maintains from those he claims to cherish. Even so, in his attempt to parse the past and face the truth he reminds us how much is available to us, if we only have the courage to choose it. —Jim Shepard, author of Phase Six
Grady Chambers is the author of the poetry collection North American Stadiums (Milkweed Editions, 2018), winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. Grady was born and raised on the north side of Chicago, and lives in Philadelphia. His writing can be found in The Atlantic, The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, The Sun, and many other publications. Grady is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow, and received his MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. More info at gradychambers.com. View titles by Grady Chambers

About

For fans of Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School and Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, Great Disasters is a stirring debut novel about six young men coming of age, and the enduring friendships that make us who we are—even as our paths diverge.

This is the story of how we became. I write those words but remain uncertain what they mean. . . . Drinking was a part of it. But as much as it was drinking, it was Ryan’s love for Jana.
And as much as it was Ryan’s love for Jana, it was equally the war.

In the early 2000s in Chicago, six young men start high school. Though they’ve been friends since boyhood, their high school years set them on new paths: The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan begin, along with the protests against them; Ryan falls in love but struggles to hold onto it; and he and the others learn to lose themselves in alcohol. With each passing year—as they enter college or the military, then the world beyond; form new relationships with partners and children; and navigate shifting loyalties to a changing country—the narrator feels the group breaking further apart and finds himself asking: What does it mean to move forward, both with and without one another?

Exploring the beauty, hope, and humor that can be found even in moments of deep loneliness and devastation, Grady Chambers’ Great Disasters moves between memories of high school and early adulthood to consider friendship, first love, patriotism, protest, addiction, and more. An exquisitely written, profoundly moving debut novel, Great Disasters is an intimate portrait of disasters big and small, personal and political—and the ways the two are intertwined—and the announcement of a stunning new voice in American fiction.

Reviews

In stark and subtle prose, [Chambers] flushes out present-day male loneliness from the places it hides: alcoholism, nomadism, and persistent fixations on long-ago romances.—Booklist, Starred Review

A master grasp on language and movement…. a gift of breathtaking prose brimming with empathy and soul.—Debutiful, Best Book of the Month

Tender and taut…. offers a message about love, loneliness, and the inescapable fervor of war that never ceases to resonate…. Remarkable.—Chicago Review of Books, Best Book of the Month

Grady Chambers, poet, has written a tender, beautifully observed debut novel, an empathic recollection of becoming, of love and what it is made of.  In Chambers’ kind voice is wonder at it all. Great Disasters is great fiction. —Christine Schutt, author of Pure Hollywood

Great Disasters is an elegiac and moving first novel. Chambers writes beautiful, precise prose that carefully narrates the story of his characters’ high school years: reckless and callow, but also formative and tender. With great compassion and an evocative sense of place and history, Chambers captures the intricate ways adulthood is shaped by the long shadows of adolescence. —Dana Spiotta, author of Wayward

Great Disasters is at once earnestly old-fashioned and quietly contemporary. Its narrator’s account of his cohort of mostly privileged Chicago boys as willfully unselfconscious drinkers from middle school to middle age seems to track America’s own dismal arc from 9/11 to the ascension of Trump. But the narrator’s focus, for better and for worse, is always himself: his fears and sadnesses regarding his own meekness and inauthenticity, and the distance he maintains from those he claims to cherish. Even so, in his attempt to parse the past and face the truth he reminds us how much is available to us, if we only have the courage to choose it. —Jim Shepard, author of Phase Six

Author

Grady Chambers is the author of the poetry collection North American Stadiums (Milkweed Editions, 2018), winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. Grady was born and raised on the north side of Chicago, and lives in Philadelphia. His writing can be found in The Atlantic, The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, The Sun, and many other publications. Grady is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow, and received his MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. More info at gradychambers.com. View titles by Grady Chambers

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