A compulsively readable, deeply human novel that examines our most basic and unquenchable emotion: want. � With his critically acclaimed first novel, Jonathan Miles was widely praised as a comic genius �after something bigger� (David Ulin, Los Angeles Times) whose fiction was �not just philosophically but emotionally rewarding� (Richard Russo, New York Times Book Review, front cover).Now, in his much anticipated second novel, Want Not, Miles takes a giant leap forward with this highly inventive and corrosively funny story of our times, a three-pronged tale of human excess that sifts through the detritus of several disparate lives�lost loves, blown chances, countless words and deeds misdirected or misunderstood�all conjoined in their come-hell-or-high-water search for fulfillment.As the novel opens on Thanksgiving Day, readers are telescoped into three different worlds in various states of disrepair�a young freegan couple living off the grid in New York City; a once-prominent linguist, sacked at midlife by the dissolution of his marriage and his father�s losing battle with Alzheimer�s; and a self-made debt-collecting magnate, whose brute talent for squeezing money out of unlikely places has yielded him a royal existence, trophy wife included.Want and desire propel these characters forward toward something, anything, more, until their worlds collide, briefly, randomly, yet irrevocably, in a shattering ending that will haunt readers long after the last page is turned.With a satirist�s eye and a romantic�s heart, Miles captures the morass and comedy of contemporary life in all its excess. Bold, unblinking, unforgettable in its irony and pathos, Want Not is a wicked, bighearted literary novel that confirms the arrival of a major voice in American fiction.