Discover more authors you’ll love listening to on Audible. Love is the spin he’s in.And as we know from Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” San Francisco is no place for someone afflicted with that peculiar sort of romantic dizziness. “He couldn’t get over on it or under it or past it or around it,” Nunn writes, the rolling rhythm betraying a kind of delight in Chance’s disorientation. Halfway through, the coolly objective third-person narrator says of Chance: “His days of respectability were behind him. Like Scottie, he’s restless, wandering, and all too ready for the ups and downs of a grand passion, vertigo be damned.Nunn has always been especially interested in life’s highs and lows, and his customary vehicle for exploring them is the West Coast culture of surfing: Southern California in his superb debut novel, “Tapping the Source,” and in his 2004 novel, “Tijuana Straits”; Northern California in “The Dogs of Winter,” which may be his masterpiece. Browse Kem Nunn’s best-selling audiobooks and newest titles. The doctor might be wrong about that too. By the time “Chance” is over, the hero has committed (or caused) several crimes, including murder, and has undergone any number of gross indignities, including a very nasty sexually transmitted disease, all in the hapless attempt to spare himself the worst consequences of his own desperate cluelessness. It’s a farce, of an unusually violent and dark-spirited kind. NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST Kem Nunn’s “surf noir” classic is a thrilling plunge into the seedy underbelly of a Southern California beach town—the inspiration for the film Point Break.People go to Huntington Beach in search of the endless parties, the ultimate highs, and the perfect waves. Featured books by Kem Nunn. Chance, like the obsessed detective Scottie Ferguson of “Vertigo,” has forgotten himself, almost willfully. By clicking 'Sign me up' I acknowledge that I have read and agree to the © 2020 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved. The streets go up and down like big waves, every steep ascent followed by a scary, exhilarating plunge, and it’s easy to lose your sense of where — and sometimes who — you are. has him on its radar and he’s profoundly bored with his work, even to the point of indulging in reveries about patients of the distant past. Kem Nunn is a third-generation Californian whose previous novels include The Dogs of Winter, Pomona Queen, Unassigned Territory, and Tapping the Source, which was made in to the film Point Break. San Francisco does its metaphoric work admirably here, though in the absence of the lyrical, even rhapsodic prose of the earlier novels’ surfing passages, Nunn’s characteristic fatalism seems starker, more pitiless than usual. Plus, receive recommendations and exclusive offers on all of your favorite books and authors from Simon & Schuster. I had never read Kem Nunn; I bought this based on the New York Times review. I normally do not read books like this, which I think of as formulaic. From Kem Nunn, the National Book Award-nominated author of Tapping the Source and The Dogs of Winter, comes an exquisitely written tale of loss and redemption. Large ideas are the least of Chance’s problems. From Kem Nunn, the National Book Award-nominated author of Kem Nunn is a third-generation Californian whose previous novels include Robert Stone Kem Nunn is an accomplished storyteller and a first-rate writer. Chance examines in his professional life, whom he describes in pithy reports written in detached, clinical prose. There was no getting around it and none of his present endeavors were likely to bring them back.” Those are startling sentences to find in a novel by Kem Nunn. Ike Tucker has come to look for his missing sister and for the three men who may have murdered her. They tell of hostile locals and shark-infested waters where waves in excess of thirty feet break a mile from shore. Nunn renders the dangerous beaches and waters of California's borderland as only the critically acclaimed poet laureate of surf noir can, and Tijuana Straits confirms his reputation as a master of suspense and a novelist of the first rank.