Preview
  • The Light Years

  • A Memoir
  • By: Chris Rush
  • Narrated by: Victor Lodato
  • Length: 10 hrs and 44 mins
  • 4.4 out of 5 stars (59 ratings)

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The Light Years

By: Chris Rush
Narrated by: Victor Lodato
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Publisher's summary

Lambda Literary Award - Nominee, 2020

Entertainment Weekly Best Books of the Year, 2019

The Light Years is a joyous and defiant coming-of-age memoir set during one of the most turbulent times in American history.

Chris Rush was born into a prosperous, fiercely Roman Catholic New Jersey family. But underneath the gleaming mid-century house, the flawless hostess mom, and the thriving businessman dad ran an unspoken tension that, amid the upheaval of the late 1960s, was destined to fracture their precarious facade.

His older sister, Donna, introduces him to the charismatic Valentine, who places a tab of acid on 12-year-old Rush’s tongue, proclaiming: “This is sacrament. You are one of us now.”

After an unceremonious ejection from an experimental art school, Rush heads to Tuscon to make a major drug purchase and, still barely a teenager, disappears into the nascent American counterculture. Stitching together a ragged assemblage of lowlifes, prophets, and fellow wanderers, he seeks kinship in the communes of the West. His adolescence is spent looking for knowledge, for the divine, for home. Given what Rush confronts on his travels - from ordinary heartbreak to unimaginable violence - it is a miracle he is still alive.

The Light Years is a prayer for vanished friends, an odyssey signposted with broken and extraordinary people. It transcends one boy’s story to perfectly illustrate the slow slide from the optimism of the 1960s into the darker and more sinister 1970s. This is a riveting, heart-stopping journey of discovery and reconciliation, as Rush faces his lost childhood and, finally, himself.

©2019 Chris Rush (P)2019 Macmillan Audio
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Critic reviews

Entertainment Weekly Best Books of the Year, 2019

What listeners say about The Light Years

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Well..

Yes, this book is interesting , it makes me want to stay away from drugs. I also think the aftermath of the 50’s is nauseating...ignoring huge problems while on prescription drugs or rough and raw drugs from the 60’s and 70’s... too much awkward sadness for me, but love this book for its earlier places the book takes you

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