Early ReviewersAndrew Pessin

When a former close friend and rival is murdered, world-weary but still aspiring optimist Jeffrey goes back to the beginning, to those fraught college years at Yale University during the 1980s and to her, to make sense of what happened—only to discover that what needs most making sense of is himself.

By turns smart, funny, and heart-wrenching, Bright College Years tracks Jeff and an ensemble cast as they navigate the shortest, gladdest, most complex years of life—and then the rest of it.

Coming of age doesn't only happen to the young.

“Bright College Years is a wistful trip in a time machine, back to those college years so filled with fun, friendship, and heartache. Travel there with Pessin to a Yale of the early 80s, when a handful of friends thought ever-so-briefly they owned the world.” —Scott Johnston, Yale ’82, author of Amazon bestseller, Campusland

Winners will receive copies in .prc (for Kindle) and .ePub formats. An historical murder mystery based on real events. Who would want to murder the world’s most famous philosopher? Turns out: nearly everyone. In 1649, Descartes was invited by the Queen of Sweden to become her Court Philosopher. Though he was the world’s leading philosopher, his life had by this point fallen apart. He was 53, penniless, living in exile in the United Provinces, alone. With much trepidation but not much choice, he arrived in Stockholm in mid-October. Shortly thereafter he was dead. Enter Adrien Baillet. A likeable misfit with a mysterious backstory, he arrives just as the French Ambassador desperately needs an impartial Frenchman to prove that Descartes died of natural causes. But solving the mystery of Descartes’s death (Baillet soon learns) requires first solving the mystery of Descartes’s life, with all its dangerous secrets ... None of it is easy, as nearly everyone is a suspect and no one can be trusted. But Baillet somehow perseveres, surprising everyone as he figures it all out—all the way to the explosive end.