Better You Go Home, by Scott Driscoll

Better You Go Home (236 pages), is the first novel by Seattle writer and writing instructor Scott Driscoll. While visiting the Czech Republic in search of his half-sister, a critically ill American man unearths long-buried family secrets.

WINNER of the Foreword Firsts Award for Debut Fiction:

5 Stars: “Driscoll ably threads an adulterous romance with medical urgency, post-war Czech history, and self-reckoning. This labyrinthine novel is an accomplished work that examines the fallout of the past…. With story lines that converge in a grotesque meeting of rivals—replete with costuming and a conflagration—there’s no shortage of suspense. Beneath the theatrics, subtler, worthy themes of letting go and renewing one’s sense of purpose take hold.”  Read more …..

—Karen Rigby, Foreword Magazine

“Moving, powerful, and compulsively readable, Better You Go Home is the unforgettable story of a man’s journey to save his own life, and how he discovers himself along the way.”

—Garth Stein, New York Times bestselling author of The Art of Racing in the Rain

“You can call this an immigrant story, a medical thriller and a tale of love. Driscoll keeps all the scenes tight, the action coming and details to the need to know. You are taken back behind the fallen Iron Curtain and the ghosts that still live and breathe there, which are all based off Driscoll’s own experiences from visiting this part of the world. The subplots don’t distract but draw you deeper into the storyline itself. If you are a fan of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo you may want to pick this novel up as well.”

—Virginia Grenier, The World of Ink Network

Seattle attorney Chico Lenoch wonders why his Czech father refuses to contact family left behind the Iron Curtain. Searching through his father’s attic after the Velvet Revolution, Chico discovers letters dated four decades earlier revealing the existence of a half-sister. He travels to the Czech Republic to find his forgotten sister and unearth the secrets his father has buried all these years.

There is self-interest behind Chico’s quest. Most urgently, he is nearing kidney failure and needs a donor organ. None of his relatives are a suitable match. Could his sister be a candidate? Chico also meets Milada, a beautiful doctor who helps him navigate the obstacles to finding his sister. While Chico idealizes his father’s homeland, Milada feels trapped. Is she really attracted to him, or is he a means of escape to the United States?

Chico confronts a moral dilemma as well. If he approaches his sister about his need for a kidney, does he become complicit with his father and the Big Shots of that generation who’ve already robbed her of so much?

Says Driscoll, “A parish priest in Iowa, a Czech relative who’d grown up on the dark side of the Iron Curtain, solemnly shook my hand upon returning the letters I’d asked him to translate, and said: ‘You have what you came for. Please do not trouble me again with this.’ There had been a suicide, a child who could not be traced, a sudden departure. This visit to the priest happened in 1994, not long after the Velvet Revolution. I went to Prague that fall, found my family’s village in eastern Bohemia. Relatives occupying the family farmhouse remembered the former residents. They had some stories, some questions of their own. Walking through that village, I began to speculate. What became of the unidentified child? What if my life had deployed on her side of the Iron Curtain? Once that question lodged in my psyche, like a small wound that wouldn’t heal, I knew that I had to write this story.”

Scott Driscoll, an award-winning instructor (the University of Washington, Educational Outreach award for Excellence in Teaching in the Arts and Humanities 2006), holds an MFA from the University of Washington and has been teaching creative writing for the University of Washington Extension for seventeen years. Click here to find Driscoll on the Web.

Watch a YouTube Interview with Scott Driscoll:

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