
Oscar Boatwright, a disenchanted philosophy professor,
receives terrible news. His mother, on her way home from
Hawaii with Oscar’s father, has died midflight, her body
cooling for hours until the plane can land. Deeply grieving, Oscar feels his life slipping out of his
control. A seemingly innocuous one-night stand with a
woman named Dawn becomes volatile when, on the first day
of classes, he realizes she is his student, and later
learns that she is a fledgling campus drug lord. To make
matters worse, his family is in debt, having lost their
modest savings to a self-help guru who had indoctrinated
Oscar’s mother by preying on her depression. Desperate to
help his family, Oscar breaks with his academic
personality—he agrees to help Dawn with a drug run. A Philosophy of Ruin rumbles with brooding nihilism, then
it cracks like a whip, hurtling Oscar and Dawn toward a
terrifying threat on the road. Can Oscar halt the
acceleration of chaos? Or was his fate never in his
control? Taut, ferocious and blazingly intelligent, A
Philosophy of Ruin is a heart-pounding thrill ride into
the darkest corners of human geography, and a
philosophical reckoning with the forces that determine
our destiny.
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