To some, home is not a place but a time.
For every child of the 1980s who’s ever said, “I want to go back.”
A nostalgic romance with a spiritual bent.
Michael “Mickey” Collins is a Generation X writer lost in a Generation Z world. He graduated from high school in 1982 and joined the Marines. A year later, he was severely burned by a terrorist bombing in Lebanon. Now, he pines for the past. Specifically, for 1982, his “last good year.”
Upon moving back to his childhood home, he receives a mysterious letter addressed to him and postmarked more than forty years ago. It’s a response from a young woman named Laura Harlech to a pen pal request he’d placed in a magazine more than four decades prior.
For literary inspiration, he writes a mock response that gets mailed by an overly conscientious mailman. But much to Mickey’s shock, he receives a reply. The logic defying reality sinks in that he has a pen pal across time. Mickey and Laura begin corresponding. Friendly banter turns into something deeper. For the first time in his life, Mickey finds himself in love. But love is hard when you have to go back to the past to realize your future. Can Mickey and Laura overcome the ultimate long distance relationship?
Chock full of 80s nostalgia—the music, the television, the movies, the fads, the events and personalities—this short but very sweet novel about love letters is itself a love letter to the greatest decade of all-time. No, it won’t change your life. But it will take you back to the time before life changed. So, dust off your VCR, put on your painter’s cap, and stick a Styx tape in your Walkman…and prepare to enter a world where it’s Forever 1982.
Meet Arthur Archambeau
