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The People We Leave Alive
Paperback
Mystery & ThrillerLiterary Fiction
Publisher Price: $21.99
Publisher: Indie Pub
Published: Oct 2 2026
Pages: 478
Weight: 1.40
Height: 1.06 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
At three fourteen in the morning, John Tandy walks into a Florida Quik Mart carrying a birthday cake he hasn't paid for, wearing one shoe, and bleeding from somewhere above his left eye.
He is twenty-seven, three days into a bender, and trying-badly-to prove that love counts more when it costs something.
Then a man walks in with a gun.
What happens over the next few minutes will follow John for fourteen years. He does something heroic. He does something unforgivable. And when the violence is over, everyone involved has to keep living.
The People We Leave Alive follows John through the wreckage: love that refuses to stay simple, prison and second chances, demolition jobs and borrowed houses, parenthood, distance, addiction, shame, and the strange ordinary days that begin to matter more than the dramatic ones ever did. Around him are people he hurts, people who hurt him, people who leave, people who return, and people who force him to confront the difference between being loved and being good.
Darkly funny, brutal, tender, and deeply human, The People We Leave Alive is a novel about consequence without erasing love. It asks what we owe the people we have damaged, whether a person can become more than the worst thing they have done, and what it means to stay when leaving would be easier.
Sometimes survival is loud.
Sometimes it is a birthday cake, a locked door, a phone call, a pair of boots beneath a chair.
Sometimes nothing happens.
And that is enough.
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