Willy Vlautin’s award-winning novel Lean on Pete,  a moving and compassionate story about a fifteen-year old-boy's unlikely connection to a failing racehorse as he struggles to find a place to call home—now a major motion picture from A24, the studio behind Moonlight and Lady Bird, starring Charlie Plummer, Chloë Sevigny, with Travis Fimmel and Steve Buscemi, and directed by Andrew Haigh ( 45 Years , Looking ). “ Lean on Pete riveted me. Reading it, I was heartbroken and moved; enthralled and convinced. This is serious American literature.” —Cheryl Strayed, Oregonian Fifteen-year-old Charley Thompson wants a home, food on the table, and a high school he can attend for more than part of a year. But as the son of a single father working in warehouses across the Pacific Northwest, Charley's been pretty much on his own. When tragic events leave him homeless weeks after their move to Portland, Oregon, Charley seeks refuge in the tack room of a run-down horse track. Charley's only comforts are his friendship with a failing racehorse named Lean on Pete and a photograph of his only known relative. In an increasingly desperate circumstance, Charley will head east, hoping to find his aunt who had once lived a thousand miles away in Wyoming—but the journey to find her will be a perilous one. In Lean on Pete , Willy Vlautin reveals the lives and choices of American youth like Charley Thompson who were failed by those meant to protect them and who were never allowed the chance to just be a kid.   *Starred Review* With his first two novels—The Motel Life (2007) and Northline (2008)—Vlautin established himself as a poet of the lower classes, his spare, knifelike prose slicing deep into the vulnerable hearts of his struggling, lonely characters. The first two books were set around Reno, but this time he moves north, into the Pacific Northwest, where he attempts something just this side of oxymoronic: an utterly unsentimental story about a boy and a horse. Charley Thompson is a 15-year-old boy who dreams of a normal home and the chance to play high-school football. Newly arrived in Portland with a mostly absent father, Charley hopes for the best and gets the worst. Suddenly homeless, he hangs out on the backstretch at Portland Meadows racetrack and finds a friend—an aging Thoroughbred named Lean on Pete. That’s exactly what Charley does, at least for a while, until Pete, bound for the slaughterhouse, needs to lean on Charley. The perilous journey on which Charley and Pete embark must end badly—think of Kirk Douglas and another loyal horse on the run from civilization in Lonely Are the Brave—but on the road Charley tells Pete the story of his life, and in this young boy’s flatly descriptive but heartbreaking words, reprising a lifetime of barely getting by (“All he had was Banquet frozen dinners and they’re the worst; well, the Salisbury steak’s alright, but there was only one of those”), Vlautin transforms what might have been a weepy, unbelievable TV-movie of a novel into a tough-and-tender account of a boy, a big-hearted horse, and a mostly unforgiving world. What Daniel Woodrell does for the hardscrabble Ozarks, Vlautin does for the underside of the New West. Unforgettable. --Bill Ott “Lean on Pete confirms his status as one of the most emotionally charged writers in America… Spare, dry, ingenuous, his prose is quickly compelling…Vlautin’s characters, memorable however curtailed their cameos might be, become a sketchbook of America…It’s a dark tale, lit with sporadic flashes of redeeming brilliance, told with aching compassion. There’s music in the stark writing, the urban clamour or Portland giving way to the keening twang of the open spaces. The band has to be a hobby now. Vlautin is a writer.” - Sunday Herald, UK “Willy Vlautin writes novels about people all alone in the wind. His prose is direct and complex in its simplicity, and his stories are sturdy and bighearted and full of lives so shattered they shimmer. All of his novels are good, but Lean on Pete is his best…His prose is strong, his storytelling is honest, and he sticks to it scene by scene. By the time Lean on Pete reaches its sweet but unsentimental end, Charley Thompson isn’t a character in a novel, but a boy readers have come to love. Lean on Pete riveted me. Reading it, I was heartbroken and moved; enthralled and convinced. This is serious American literature.” - Cheryl Strayed, The Oregonian “Lean on Pete confirms his status as one of the most emotionally charged writers in America… Vlautin’s characters, memorable however curtailed their cameos might be, become a sketchbook of America…The band has to be a hobby now. Vlautin is a writer.” - Sunday Herald, UK “Among my favourite novels of the year have been Willy Vlautin’s Lean on Pete which is possibly his bleakest yet.” - New Statesman, “Books of the Year” “As one boy’s journey, Lean on Pete is as real as blood: as a novel it is remarkable. Willy Vlautin, romantic and realist, has writt