In three weeks, Melville House is due to publish the latest fantastic novel by Jonathan Carroll! MR. BREAKFAST, ‘a new story about the roads not taken and a magical tattoo that opens doorways to other realities’, is due to arrive in shops on January 17th, 2023. Here’s the synopsis…

Graham Patterson’s life has hit a dead end. His career as a comedian is failing. The love of his life recently broke up with him and he literally has no idea what to do next. With nothing to lose, he buys a new car and hits the road, planning to drive across country and hopefully figure out his next moves before reaching California.

But along the way Patterson does something his old self would never have even considered: he gets tattooed by a brilliant tattoo artist in North Carolina. The decision sets off a series of extraordinary events that changes his life forever in ways he never could have imagined. Among other things, Patterson is gifted with the ability to see in real time three different lives that are available to him. The choice is his: The life he is leading right now, or two very different ones. In all of them there is love or fame and of course danger because once he has chosen, there is no telling what will happen next.

Mr. Breakfast is a dazzling, absorbing and deeply moving novel about the choices that we have to confront and face, confirming Jonathan Carroll’s status as one of our greatest and most imaginative storytellers.

The novel has already started to generate some great pre-publication reviews. Here are just a few of them…

‘Jonathan Carroll is one of my favorite living writers. [MR. BREAKFAST is] a  beautiful, brilliant, meditation on art, love, inspiration and what makes life worthwhile. Such a treat.’ — Neil Gaiman

‘Like Murakami, Brian Eno, or David Lynch, Jonathan Carroll is entirely sui generis, someone whose work is so fresh, weird, and original, it stands in a class of its own. Maybe the most striking thing about this lean, remarkable novel is Carroll’s caffeinated curiosity about everything, his roving eye for everyday wonders, for the effervescent in the banal. MR. BREAKFAST is a small book of big ideas, a set of Russian nesting dolls with an entire universe glowing at the centre.’ — Joe Hill, bestselling author of Horns, NOS4A2, and Netflix’s recent Locke and Key

‘Few recent works of fiction in any genre have touched on the vagaries of life, love, and art more movingly or with deeper understanding. An intoxicating, deeply affecting novel by the influential fantasist.’ — Kirkus (Starred Review)

‘A compulsively readable, introspective tale about the road not taken… At its heart, this is an arresting and imaginative meditation on life. Perfect for fans of magical realism with a free-flowing style like that of David Mitchell and Toshikazu Kawaguchi.’ — Library Journal

‘As always with the exceptionally imaginative Carroll, he creates complex worlds for his hero to inhabit and with clever crossovers between realms that are carefully thought out and fun to explore. Carroll’s attention to details is impressive, and the unexpected prevails.’ — Booklist

‘Reading Jonathan Carroll, one thinks of a blind person stroking a drugged tiger – an experience that is sensuous, dreamy, and dangerous all at once. And then, of course, the tiger wakes up.’ — Bruce Wagner, novelist and screenwriter

‘… unique mixture of the mundane and the metaphysical… sudden time shifts, the nostalgic landscapes of middle America, mysterious tutelary figures, encounters with earlier selves, photographs and tattoos, and, inevitably, very ingratiating dogs. It even includes some subtle allusions to his own earlier work. By any measure, this is vintage Carroll, which is another way of saying it’s entirely new… the sense of infinite possibility – which after all is the main appeal of Road Not Taken stories – is exhilarating, even through the novel’s somber, sad, or occasionally sentimental moments.’ — Locus