Max, the Blind Guy

Maximilian Ruth daydreams in colors which his eyes can no longer see. His wife is leading them on a European tour: Prague, Vienna, Salzburg, and Venice. Greta Ruth calls this trip their "last hurrah." She hasn't had the best from 40 years with Max. But Max takes their life differently: marriage is an affair of more than the heart's journey. This pair of American originals have known passion, riches, and sorrow. Greta now wonders if the plan will see her through to the promised "champagne on the Grand Canal."

Their Elite Travel tour-mates are getting on each other's nerves. They are characters found next door, on everyday streets, under black-eye days, and across lost-memory nights. The highlights and sights, the posh lunches, the gamy conversation over drinks in the bar - and of course the "tour friendships" - all make their faux-camaraderie sometimes combative but never boring.

"Max, the blind guy" is a complex, emotional story of love, marriage, art, and ego. Beyer's nuanced story brings to life fictional characters from America and Europe as a group of recalcitrant retirees make their Grand Tour.

A story rife with modern perils - too much time, too much money, just enough libido, secrets revealed - Max and Greta Ruth don't wait for what the future may bring.

• What people are saying:

  "Precocious. Provocative. Poignant. Mark Beyer's massive novel "Max, the blind guy" is built like an intricate mansion of dozens of opulently adorned rooms and secret passageways and windows and doors that open up to the bright and vibrant world beyond. Told through multiple points of view, the story explores the delights, disappointments, disturbances, and distractions of love, lust, and the desire to get to the next place. Language play, humor, despair, and the engagement of a complicated community of characters, Mark Beyer's "Max, the Blind Guy" brings to mind the work of his literary predecessors such as Nabokov, Marquez, Dickens, and Dostoevsky. Good company. Good reading." -- Patricia Ann McNair, author, THE TEMPLE OF AIR