Second Hand

At last, the novel for everyone who has ever loved something secondhand—the High Fidelity of garage sales, the On the Road of thrift shopping, The Moviegoer of the flea market. Richard owns a secondhand store ("Satori Junk") just outside Detroit. He's the kind of guy for whom not much happens, until it happens all at once: his mother dies. He rummages his parents' basement for good junk and finds (alongside "every purse my mother has ever owned since the Fifties") a box of photos that changes his view of everything. He falls apart over his mother's notes on his favorite meal in an old cookbook. He meets Theresa, a fellow hipster, a thrift-attired junk goddess who shares his feeling for castaways, and he falls for her—hard. Along the way he acquires some junk wisdom about love and loss. Richard's inimitable, hilarious, philosophical, self-deprecating, yearning voice, and his sharp and loving eye for common foibles and unexpected virtues make for a comic novel crammed full of surprise and pleasure. Second Hand is peppered with insight as unpretentious and satisfying as the unexpected garage sale find. Junk, Richard tells us, "has taught me that to find new use for an object discarded is an act of glistening purity. I have learned that a camera case makes a damn fine purse or that 40 copies of 'Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass's Whipped Cream and Other Delights' may be used to cover a wall of a bedroom…Junk has taught me that all will come to junk eventually, and much sooner than you think."

"A colorful first novel…if you're a yard sale lover…Second Hand may feel like a gift from the [Tiki] gods.", "Second Hand illuminates how there can be so many stories that are tied to forgotten treasures that are tucked away.", "An uncommon sweetness and charity towards the castoffs of the world animate this book, which is both funny and moving, especially as it moves toward its surprisingly beautiful ending. Michael Zadoorian has written a fine and wonderful novel about one of the most unusual of subjects: junk, and those who care for valuable objects, living and dead, that others have thrown away.", "Second Hand hooked me right away—Zadoorian is a stylist with his own sound. He's a very entertaining writer, hip and funny.", "Michael Zadoorian speaks to the heart and soul of the junker, but when he writes, 'Junkers know that we don't have to want the things we're told to want, that it's important to love that which seems to have no worth,' he speaks to all of us searching for worth in our lives."

Michael Zadoorian is the author of three novels, Beautiful Music, The Leisure Seeker, Second Hand, and a story collection, The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit. A lifelong resident of the Detroit area, he lives with his wife in a 1937 bungalow filled with cats and objects that used to be in the houses of other people.