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Rex Pickett

Rex Pickett

  • The follow-up novel to the blockbuster Sideways—the inspiration for the award-winning film of the same name, starring Paul Giamatti—Sideways Oregon tracks the continuing story of Miles Raymond and his buddy Jack.

    Seven years have passed since Miles and Jack took their infamous bachelor trip to the Santa Ynez Valley. Miles has written a novel that was made into a wildly successful movie, which changed his life. Jack, contrarily, is divorced, has a kid, and is on the skids. Phyllis, Miles’s mom, suffered a stroke that left her wheelchair-bound and wasting away in assisted living, and she desperately wants to live with her sister in Wisconsin.

    When Miles gets invited to be master of ceremonies at the International Pinot Festival in Oregon, he hatches a harebrained scheme. With Jack as his copilot, he leases a handicapped-equipped van, hires a pot-smoking Filipina caretaker, and—with his mother’s rascally Yorkie in tow—they take off for Wisconsin via Oregon’s fabled Willamette Valley.

    This is one road trip that is anything but predictable …

  • From bestselling author Rex Pickett comes Sideways New Zealand, the next delightfully dark and funny novel in the Sideways series.

    Miles Raymond thought things were going relatively well.

    Miles, the now iconic alter ego of author Rex Pickett—who was first introduced in the critically acclaimed book Sideways and its award-winning movie adaptation—resurfaces on the South Island of New Zealand. All he has in life is a half hectare of Pinot Noir, a guest cottage where his days are numbered, a special needs cat named Max, and a winemaker partner pressing him for a more committed relationship.

    These modest assets are balanced by the impending publication of Miles’s new novel, A Year of Pure Feeling. His fledgling publicist has arranged for a book tour that will take Miles along the east coast of New Zealand, from Oamaru to Auckland, to a series of increasingly interesting Kiwi book clubs. In a six-ton camper van! In the winter!

    Jack Manse, after a divorce and a financial disaster, has reinvented himself and gleefully volunteers to copilot, too delighted at the prospect of a road trip and a reunion with Miles to heed his friend’s objections.

    Alternately blackly comical and poignantly heartbreaking, what started as a book tour through New Zealand becomes a journey through Miles’s soul.

  • From the Academy Award–winning writer Rex Pickett comes the third installment in the Sideways series.

    Sideways Chile follows the further adventures of Miles Raymond (played by Paul Giamatti in the critically acclaimed movie Sideways). It’s now a few years later and Miles is a successful author with a blockbuster movie adaptation under his belt, but he’s still searching for something, and depression has him, once again, in its taloned grip.

    When he is offered a chance to travel to the country of Chile and visit their wine regions for a magazine assignment, Miles—his world turned upside down by bad financial investments and even worse luck with relationships—happily agrees. A somewhat rudderless Miles finds Chile, their people, and their spectacular and vastly diverse wine regions, to be just the first step in a life-transforming journey.

  • The book that inspired the film of the same name, staring Paul Giamatti, Sideways is a beautifully crafted buddy novel full of “witty dialogue, and bags of well-crafted entertainment” (Yorkshire Times).

    Sideways is the story of two friends—Miles and Jack—going away together for the last time to steep themselves in everything that makes it good to be young and single: Pinot, putting, and prowling bars. In the week before Jack plans to marry, the pair heads out from Los Angeles to the Santa Ynez Valley wine country. For Jack, the tasting tour is Seven Days to D-Day, his final stretch of freedom. For Miles—who has divorced his wife, is facing an uncertain career, and has lost his passion for living—the trip is a weeklong opportunity to evaluate his past, his future, and himself.

    A raucous and surprising novel filled with wonderful details about wine, Sideways is also a thought-provoking and funny book about men, women, and human relationships.

  • A November Book Pick from The New York Times

    When archivist Nadia Fontaine is found dead of an apparent drowning, Emily Snow is hired by Regents University to finish the job she started—to organize and process the papers of Raymond West, a famous Pulitzer Prize–winning author who has been short-listed for the Nobel.

    Emily’s job comes with its inherent pressures. West’s wife, Elizabeth, is an heiress who’s about to donate $25 million to the Memorial Library—an eight-story architectural marvel that is the crown jewel of the university. The inaugural event in just a few months will be a gala for the who’s who of San Diego to celebrate the unveiling of the Raymond West Collection and the financial gift that made it all possible.

    As Emily sets to work on the West papers, it begins to dawn on her that several items have gone missing from the collection. To trace their whereabouts, she gains unsupervised access to the highly restricted “dark archives,” in which she opens a Pandora’s box of erotically and intellectually charged correspondence between Raymond West and the late Nadia Fontaine. Through their archived emails, Emily goes back a year in time and relives the tragic trajectory of their passionate love affair. Did Nadia really drown accidentally, as the police report concluded, or could it have been suicide, or, even worse, murder? Compelled to complete the collection and find the truth, Emily unwittingly morphs into an adult Nancy Drew and a one-woman archivist crusader on a mission to right the historical record.

    Twisting slowly like a tourniquet, The Archivist turns into a suspenseful murder mystery with multiple and intersecting layers. Not just a whodunit, it is also a profound meditation on love, privacy, and the ethics of destroying or preserving materials of a highly personal nature.