DRINK

DRINK is a story about what we carry-guilt, addiction, memory-and the quiet, painful work of learning to set it down.
Avery Sloan wakes up hungover in a stranger's bed and stumbles back to a life he barely recognizes. Once a gifted high school teacher, now just another man disappearing into his own mess, he's offered one last shot: a temporary teaching job at a school for kids on the edge. But Avery knows second chances always come with strings-and his hands are far from steady.
As he tries to rejoin a world he once believed in, Avery is haunted by past relationships, buried grief, and the constant pull of the bottle. Old flames. Fresh wounds. A classroom full of teenagers who see more than he wants to show. Every day becomes a test, not of curriculum, but of endurance, honesty, and the slow work of becoming someone worth trusting again.
Set against the sun-drenched grit of New Mexico, DRINK is a piercing, quietly devastating novel about addiction, recovery, and the fragile possibility of redemption. For readers of Denis Johnson, Ocean Vuong, and Raymond Carver, this is a portrait of a man trying not to be saved, but to stay standing.