Who says you can't run away from your problems?You are a failed novelist about to turn 50. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: Your boyfriend of the past nine years is engaged to someone else. You can't say yes ' it would be too awkward ' and you can't say no ' it would look like defeat. On your desk are a series of invitations to half-baked literary events around the world.Question: How do you arrange to skip town? Answer: You accept them all.What would possibly go wrong?Arthur Less will almost fall in love in Paris, almost fall to his death in Berlin, barely escape to a Moroccan ski chalet from a Saharan sandstorm, accidentally book himself as the (only) writer-in-residence at a Christian Retreat Center in Southern India, and encounter, on a desert island in the Arabian Sea, the last person on Earth he wants to face. Somewhere in there: He will turn 50. Through it all there is his first love. And there is his last.Because despite all these mishaps, missteps, misunderstandings, and mistakes, Less is, above all, a love story.A scintillating satire of the American abroad, a rumination on time and the human heart, a bittersweet romance of chances lost, by an author the New York TimesLess shows a writer at the peak of his talents raising the curtain on our shared human comedy.A Hachette Audio production.