Jetson's Journey: A Novel by Brock Alston

Michael Smith had a career, a family, and a life that fit the way it was supposed to. Then, in a single day, he lost almost all of it.

He drives east with a duffel bag, a black Lab named Jetson, the dog his daughter loved, the last living thread to the family he lost, and a painting his daughter gave him that he still can’t bring himself to look at. He has nowhere else to go and ends up in Franklin, Tennessee. He takes a job stocking groceries. He volunteers at the animal shelter. He begins to write, fragments at first, then something more, about the dog and the grief and the stubborn act of waking up each morning and choosing to stay.

He doesn’t expect the bookstore owner with the steady hands and the sharp questions. The neighbor’s hostility turns out to hide something more complicated. Franklin, somehow, makes a place for him before he’d thought to ask. But Michael isn’t the only one carrying secrets. Some pasts don’t stay buried, and a single bad decision in his old life is about to come looking for him.

Jetson’s Journey is a contemporary literary novel about loss, second chances, and the patient grace of an animal who refuses to give up on a man who has given up on himself.