FAIL SONS, coming October 6, 2026.
Pre-order at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Bookshop.org
A pair of estranged brothers drive their father’s cryonically frozen body across a divided America to its final resting place in this darkly comic novel about masculinity and grief.
When Scott Platt’s brother, Nick, calls to ask him to fly to Arizona and retrieve their father’s body from the Cryo Center where it’s been frozen since the nineties, the timing couldn’t be worse: He’s forty, unemployed, and spiraling as he and his wife await the birth of their first child. Nick’s as tightly wound as Scott is adrift, and the brothers have never gotten along. But the Cryo Center’s shutting down, and they’ve got six days to haul their father’s frozen body to a new facility in Massachusetts—without letting it thaw past –109°. And Scott needs to get back home to New York before his wife goes into labor.
It’s the summer of 2022. The country’s still reeling from the pandemic. And driving a corpse cross-country in a U-Haul through Red State America proves predictably chaotic. Nick insists on wearing a KN95 the entire time. They pass through deserts, mountains, and plains, encountering Aryan cops, ex-Mormon hitchhikers, a Gen Z commune, and MAGA-hat-wearing Walmart clerks. They play blackjack, take shrooms, and swim under the stars—all while trying to keep the body frozen and their relationship from melting down.
Fail Sons is a brilliant exploration of masculinity, grief, and the ways we carry the dead—and each other—across a divided America.
Praise for Fail Sons
A Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2026
“A consistently amusing road comedy with dark-ish undertones.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Hysterical… Irreverent and often touching . . . Fail Sons is a compelling novel about the frayed edges of the American Dream and people’s capacity to pursue it nonetheless.”
—Foreword Reviews
“Hilarious and humane. Adam Wilson is so funny and readable that the depth of his work almost sneaks up on you. Fail Sons weighs prolonged adolescence against true adulthood, in a road trip novel that begins in cynicism and ends in tenderness. It actually made me hopeful for men.”
—Erin Somers, author of The Ten Year Affair
“What begins as a stoner road-trip comedy evolves into something closer to John Williams’s Stoner: a poignant meditation on midlife masculinity, perfectionism, and failure, shot through with Adam Wilson’s signature wit, pathos, and crystalline language.”
—Teddy Wayne, author of The Winner
“Adam Wilson’s Fail Sons is the funniest, sharpest depiction of the American male in crisis that I’ve read in a long time. Even more impressive than the book’s perfect comic timing is its clear-eyed and generous reckoning with the hard truths of (don’t call it) middle age, the compromises and impossible choices required to survive these unforgiving years. There are echoes of great predecessors like Elkin, Michaels, and Lipsyte, but the voice is entirely Wilson’s own. I tore right through it, and can’t wait to read it again.”
—Andrew Martin, author of Down Time