The Promise of Elsewhere, A novel

**A comic novel about a Midwestern professor who tries to prop up his failing

prospects for happiness by setting out on the Journey of a Lifetime.**

Louie Hake is forty-three and teaches architectural history at a third-rate

college in Michigan. His second marriage is collapsing, and he's facing a

potentially disastrous medical diagnosis. In an attempt to fend off what has

become a soul-crushing existential crisis, he decides to treat himself to a

tour of the world's most breathtaking architectural sites. Perhaps not

surprisingly, Louie gets waylaid on his very first stop in Rome--ludicrously,

spectacularly so--and fails to reach most of his other destinations. He

embarks on a doomed romance with a jilted bride celebrating her ruined

marriage plans alone in London. And in the Arctic he finds that turf houses

and aluminum sheds don't amount to much of an architectural tradition. But it

turns out that there's another sort of architecture there: icebergs the size

of cathedrals, bobbing beside a strange and wondrous landscape. It soon

becomes clear that Louie's grand journey is less about where his wanderings

have taken him and more about where his past encounters with romance have not.

Whether pursuing his first wife, or his estranged current wife, or the older

woman he kissed just once a quarter-century ago, Louie reveals himself to be

endearing, deeply touching, wonderfully ridiculous . . . and destined to find

love in all the wrong places.