American Battle meets In to the Crazy in Brian Hart’s epic saga of one man’s battle to survive a hostile world-tracing his path from a self-destructive, skateboarding youth in the 90s to the longer term as he journeys across a desolate, militia-controlled American Western to find his missing family-perfect for fans of Edan Lepuki and Cormac McCarthy.

In the America of a near future, northern California and the Pacific Northwest have become a desolate wasteland controlled by about Trouble No Man: A Book violent separatist militias and marked by too little water and fuel. In a village outside Reno, a middle-aged man visits an undertaker and gathers the ashes of his lifeless wife to bring to Alaska. There, their children await them-refugees in the destruction from the south. To attain his only staying family, the person must mix the treacherous, violent surroundings north by bike, his pet his only partner.

Thirty years earlier, we meet Roy Bingham. After a rough-and-tumble years as a child, Roy can be numbing himself with skateboarding, drugs, and sex, when he matches Karen. Sassy, soulful, and arresting, Karen pulls Roy into her orbit until she decides to stop their nomadic life-style to place down origins in her hometown of Loyalton, California. Roy’s fidelity buckles beneath the commitment and after a boozy night in Reno he leaves Karen for the road and skateboarding.

Flashing backwards and forwards with time across four decades in the life span of a man who is lost even though he’s found, Difficulty No Guy delivers a resonant tale of survival, assault, and family, set against the tumult of an America on the precipice to become an unfree country.