The witness protection program is supposed to be a fresh start, but for the newly inducted Easterday family, it’s more like a personal apocalypse. The mother refuses to leave their home in Baltimore, the father sinks into paranoia, and seventeen-year-old Ana gets stuck caring for him in the forsaken town of Morocco, Indiana, wondering if she’s lost her future as well as her past. When a former hitman named Zeeshan offers them a way to come back home, Ana has to determine whether she would get her life back or lose it entirely. Over the course of a few months, she’ll make her way through an underground world of reformed gangsters, hungry politicians, and teenagers smuggled in from the villages of Kashmir, all of them trying to find the line between secret and identity.
Do Not Go On is a story about secrets, second chances, and the ways that storytelling can save your skin and soul. In this book that is part crime confessional, part coming-of-age tale, the Witness Protection Program and college application process are two different ways of getting at the same question: Who are you, and who will you become?
“Do Not Go On, the new novel by Bryan Furuness, goes deep, goes funny, goes suspenseful, often on the same page. His language will often make you slow down and savor the inventiveness of a phrase, a sentence, an observation, while the plot tugs at you to turn the page. This is a brainy thriller that will more than once break your heart. And you will gratefully pick up the pieces and continue, wanting more of the foibles, surprises, self-deceptions, hopeful determination and spacious inner lives of his lively cast of characters.”
“Reading Do Not Go On is like riding a Harley in a bouncy house; there’s no way to tell quite where you’re going. Not only that, but the bouncy house is deep and dark; you will need your courage and a headlight. No one peels the onion like Bryan Furuness.”
—Michael Poore, author of Up Jumps the Devil and Reincarnation Blues
“Bryan Furuness’s Do Not Go On is a coming-of-age novel wrapped inside of a thriller. With a devastatingly powerful prose style, Furuness builds a world where the simplest and most familiar allegiances are dangerous as hell, and the only way to save yourself is to become more compassionate and human than you ever believed possible.”
—Dan Barden, author of The Next Right Thing and John Wayne: A Novel
Want a taste? Here’s a brief excerpt.