Mr. Breakfast
Graham Patterson is a stand up comic whose career is stalling and whose long relationship has just ended, so he sets out on a road trip with no clear destination. In a small North Carolina town he meets a tattoo artist offering something impossible, a design that reveals three parallel lives he could inhabit. What follows is a strange, tender novel in which Graham steps between versions of himself with different loves, losses, and moral weights, trying to figure out what makes a life worth choosing. Jonathan Carroll has built a career on this kind of quiet magical realism, and Mr. Breakfast is one of his most affecting late novels. It is a book about desire, regret, and the mystery of ordinary lives.
What you might want to know about Mr. Breakfast
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A failing comedian gets a magical tattoo that lets him see three of his possible lives and must choose which one to actually live.
Yes. Gaiman blurbed Mr. Breakfast and has long been a public admirer of Jonathan Carroll, calling him one of the best living writers of the strange and recommending his novels for decades.
No. Mr. Breakfast stands on its own, though readers who enjoy it often go back to earlier Carroll novels such as The Land of Laughs and Bones of the Moon.
Mr. Breakfast was written by Jonathan Carroll, published in 2023 by Melville House.
Mr. Breakfast is 320 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Mr. Breakfast takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
Mr. Breakfast is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
