Goleman Eck is an abortion survivor. Literally. As such, he is subject to other people’s uses of him for political, religious, and media purposes. Some for whom he “doesn’t look right” threaten his life. Others know Gole as a lover or true friend.

Whirling together the contemporary outrageous and the serio-comic, Robert Ready’s Eck: A Romance is wholly new fiction, a quest for identity, purpose, love—even what it means to be alive.

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Novelist and critic William Giraldi, author of Hold the Dark and American Audacity, offers these lines about Eck:

“Robert Ready’s Eck: A Romance is a masterwork of shimmering prose and uncommon perception. Here is a novelist in consummate control of his material. In its observant integrity, its duet of substance and style, its sustaining grand idea of origins and the unborn living, Eck calls us back to the nourishing womb of Literature, singing of the great subjects, including the mother/son dyad and the fates we might or might not be prepared to fathom. Ready’s sentences never quit reaching within and without, activating analogues as they go: many lines in this novel have never before been penned. The originality, darkling humor, and probing intelligence of the whole symphonic telling is a marvel that calls up DeLillo at his best. The sheer potency of seeing is itself what every novelist must aspire to and what makes every ecstatic reader go Ahh. This novel is an astonishing accomplishment that will not let you forget it.”