• Age: 16 to 18
• Grade: 11 to 12

It's 1978, the year after Elvis Presley died, and Kepler Pressler is a sixteen-year-old Toronto kid with an obsessive attachment to his sock monkey, a tendency to burst into tears, a mother with a nail fetish and a fondness for Shakespeare, and a father who says he works for the Space Agency and disappears a lot. Is dad dead? And what exactly happened on Kepler's 16th birthday? He is devoting a year to figuring it out in a mental health institute.

Adam Lindsay Honsinger's profile page

Adam Lindsay Honsinger is a Toronto based writer and teacher. Many of his storieshave appeared in literary journals such as Descant, Prism International, Other Voices, the Pottersfield Portfolio, and Exile Quarterly. Two of his stories were nominated for the Journey Prize, one of which won Silver at the 2010 National Magazine Awards.

"The son of an alcoholic, taxi-driving, amateur astronomer and a disillusioned manicurist, Kepler Pressler - the anti-hero of Adam Honsinger's startlingly assured first novel - does for the family-dysfunction novel what Elvis did for rock 'n roll: he makes it bluesier, edgier, funnier, better."- Annabel Lyon "admirably zany without ever tipping into quirk." - The Winnipeg Review "Nervy, audacious domestic drama with the guile and electricity of a Presley hip swivel, Gracelessland proves what many of us have long suspected: Honsinger is a writer of immeasurable talent, and family is an affliction from which few recover." - Nancy Lee "The broad-strokes familiarity of the overarching narrative allows Kepler's personal peculiarities - and Honsinger's skills as a writer - to shine through … a novel that feels fresh, rich, and heavy with the thrum of life." - Robert Wiersema, Quill and Quire