Adventure, romance, and literary, Bewilderment is a novel in which the action shifts back and forth between the Indian subcontinent (India, and then Pakistan) and Los Angeles.

As introduced by Tailwinds Press, the publisher, back cover of the book and author page at Tailwinds, the story is summed up as follows:

After three decades of an over-extended youth abroad, fifty-six-year-old Wade Ricky returns home to the Los Angeles suburbs to care for his dying mother and come to terms with his memories of an awkwardly sensual affair with Herta, a German woman he meets while biking across India; a two-year stint in Peshawar as an assistant to a blind British expat; and a cheerfully surreal world of drugs and sexual voyeurism in which Wade is continually a complicit outsider. As months turn into years, Wade finds companionship with a landscape painter grieving for her son killed in Iraq and slowly rebuilds his life in America–even as he begins to understand, finally, why he must be alone.

In pared-down, richly evocative prose that captures the hidden complexities of social and geopolitical relations, Michael Onofrey’s debut novel is a loving, even joyful meditation about the transience of human connection and the experience of solitude.

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Michael Onofrey was born and raised in Los Angeles. Currently, he lives in Japan. Over seventy of his short stories have been published in literary journals and magazines, in print and online, in such places as Cottonwood, The Evansville Review, Natural Bridge, Snowy Egret, Terrain.org, Weber–The Contemporary West, and The William and Mary Review. Among anthologized work, his stories have appeared in Creativity & Constraint (Wising Up Press, 2014), In New Light (Northern Initiative for Social Action, 2013), Road to Nowhere and Other New Stories from the Southwest (University of New Mexico Press, 2013), and Imagination & Place: An Anthology (Imagination & Place Press, 2009).