If you could take just one thing back… Every Little Thing explores how lives are shaped by the butterfly effect of decisions that go desperately wrong. After a shocking family tragedy, Cohen Davies feels isolated, guilty, and numb to everything except the allure of his new neighbor, Allie Crosbie. She’s a free spirit, and he sees in her the perfect place to bury his troubles. But when Allie’s father asks an unfathomable favour, Cohen’s decision to help him sets off a chain reaction of irrevocable events that leave one man dead, one man assaulted, and Cohen incarcerated. In the aftermath, Allie will reveal a shocking secret of her own. With his award-winning debut, Away From Everywhere, Chad Pelley showed us his verve as a novelist; Every Little Thing shows us the flipside of love, and Pelley cuts no corners in exposing how a secret kept to protect love can just as easily destroy a life.
Every Little Thing’s protagonist, Cohen Davies, is as psychologically rich and prismatic a character as any reader could hope for – here is complicated love, human failing, tenacity and true feeling. Chad Pelley takes on addling jealousy, heartache, loss, and the need to be forgiven. Stylistically fresh, taut with emotional torques and charges, Pelley’s Every Little Thing is can't-put-it-down compelling.
From the cold clutch of a prison cell to the serenity of a lover’s arms and back again, this is the tale of a man whose pugnacious heart is both literally and figuratively broken. In Every Little Thing Chad Pelley delivers a transfixing chronicle of what happens when devotion and jealousy ride alongside a clumsy desire for a just world. Compulsively readable from start to finish.