Husbands: A Novel

Six years ago, on a stag weekend in Las Vegas, Kyle Macdonald married a stranger in an Elvis chapel. He was blind drunk. The stranger was Hollywood director Aaron Biedermeier, who told Siri to remind him to annul it in the morning.

Nobody did.

Now Kyle is twenty-eight, a supply teacher back in his childhood bedroom in Birmingham, three months out of a relationship and still being texted by a Grindr date who stood him up. Then a Los Angeles number calls. His husband is in a coma. His presence is required.

Business class to the Beverly Hills Hotel sounds like the career break Kyle never got. It turns out to be a front-row seat at a scandal: an accusation, a dead teenage actor, a publicist who takes his passport, and a fiancé called Noah who is twenty-two, beautiful, and lying about almost everything.

What follows involves a cherry-red VW camper, Route 66, a Baptist pastor with a secret, a wedding broadcast live to the nation, and the slow, inconvenient business of two men falling for each other while running from the same man.

Sharp, funny and unexpectedly romantic, Husbands is a novel about fame, complicity, and what it costs to stop being polite.

For readers of Alexis Hall's Boyfriend Material and Steven Rowley's The Guncle.