Lean on Pete: A Novel

Willy Vlautin’s award-winning novel Lean on Pete, a moving and compassionate story about a fifteen-year old-boy's unlikely connection to a failing racehorse as he struggles to find a place to call home—now a major motion picture from A24, the studio behind Moonlight and Lady Bird, starring Charlie Plummer, Chloë Sevigny, with Travis Fimmel and Steve Buscemi, and directed by Andrew Haigh (45 Years, Looking).

“Lean on Pete riveted me. Reading it, I was heartbroken and moved; enthralled and convinced. This is serious American literature.”
—Cheryl Strayed, Oregonian

Fifteen-year-old Charley Thompson wants a home, food on the table, and a high school he can attend for more than part of a year. But as the son of a single father working in warehouses across the Pacific Northwest, Charley's been pretty much on his own. When tragic events leave him homeless weeks after their move to Portland, Oregon, Charley seeks refuge in the tack room of a run-down horse track. Charley's only comforts are his friendship with a failing racehorse named Lean on Pete and a photograph of his only known relative. In an increasingly desperate circumstance, Charley will head east, hoping to find his aunt who had once lived a thousand miles away in Wyoming—but the journey to find her will be a perilous one.

In Lean on Pete, Willy Vlautin reveals the lives and choices of American youth like Charley Thompson who were failed by those meant to protect them and who were never allowed the chance to just be a kid.

Fifteen-year-old Charley Thompson wants a home, food on the table, and a high school he can attend for more than part of a year. But as the son of a single father working in warehouses across the Pacific Northwest, Charley's been pretty much on his own. When tragic events leave him homeless weeks after their move to Portland, Oregon, Charley seeks refuge in the tack room of a run-down horse track. Charley's only comforts are his friendship with a failing racehorse named Lean on Pete and a photograph of his only known relative. In an increasingly desperate circumstance, Charley will head east, hoping to find his aunt who had once lived a thousand miles away in Wyoming—but the journey to find her will be a perilous one.

In Vlautin's third novel, Lean on Pete, he reveals the lives and choices of American youth like Charley Thompson who were failed by those meant to protect them and who were never allowed the chance to just be a kid.

“Lean on Pete confirms his status as one of the most emotionally charged writers in America… Spare, dry, ingenuous, his prose is quickly compelling…Vlautin’s characters, memorable however curtailed their cameos might be, become a sketchbook of America…It’s a dark tale, lit with sporadic flashes of redeeming brilliance, told with aching compassion. There’s music in the stark writing, the urban clamour or Portland giving way to the keening twang of the open spaces. The band has to be a hobby now. Vlautin is a writer.” - Sunday Herald, UK

“Willy Vlautin writes novels about people all alone in the wind. His prose is direct and complex in its simplicity, and his stories are sturdy and bighearted and full of lives so shattered they shimmer. All of his novels are good, but Lean on Pete is his best…His prose is strong, his storytelling is honest, and he sticks to it scene by scene. By the time Lean on Pete reaches its sweet but unsentimental end, Charley Thompson isn’t a character in a novel, but a boy readers have come to love. Lean on Pete riveted me. Reading it, I was heartbroken and moved; enthralled and convinced. This is serious American literature.” - Cheryl Strayed, The Oregonian

“Lean on Pete confirms his status as one of the most emotionally charged writers in America… Vlautin’s characters, memorable however curtailed their cameos might be, become a sketchbook of America…The band has to be a hobby now. Vlautin is a writer.” - Sunday Herald, UK

“Among my favourite novels of the year have been Willy Vlautin’s Lean on Pete which is possibly his bleakest yet.” - New Statesman, “Books of the Year”

“As one boy’s journey, Lean on Pete is as real as blood: as a novel it is remarkable. Willy Vlautin, romantic and realist, has written something special that will make you shudder, weep, rage and wonder at how such things happen and do, and how some individuals such as Charley can suffer them, absorb the grief, and somehow survive. How good is contemporary US fiction? This good: catch your breath good. - Irish Times, Eileen Battersby

“If you want an unadorned portrait of American life (at least in some places) at the beginning of the 21st century, this is the book for you...the novel reveals itself as a modern retelling of Huckleberry Finn. Charley takes off with Pete, as Huck takes off with the slave Jim, knowing that even though he doesn’t own the horse, he can’t see him destroyed. He hopes to make his way to Wyoming--about a thousand miles--and find his long-lost aunt. Along the way, like Huck, he encounters an array of all-American characters, most of them on the run, if not from the police, then from the American dream. Vlautin’s eye for detail is sharp: every character is distinctly drawn and memorable. Each of Charley’s encounters has the authentic feel of two lives intersecting and then diverging; they leap off the page as individuals with motives and backstories...for sheer cinéma-vérité detailing of American life right now, Lean on Pete is a good place to start.” - Jane Smiley, The Guardian

“The writing is spare and straightforward…There is intensity in Vlautin’s narration, and also beauty and power…Vlautin’s major accomplishment lies in posing a damning question: How could we, as a society, have allowed this to happen?” - Seattle Times

“The comparisons with Steinbeck and Carver are richly deserved, yet Vlautin is a truly original voice…powerful, heartbreaking stuff. Just three novels in and Vlautin is already one of the best writers in America.” - Mark Billingham

“Reading Willy Vlautin is like jumping into a clear, cold lake in the middle of summer. His prose is beautifully spare and clean, but underneath the surface lies an incredible depth, with all kinds of hidden stories and emotions resting in the shadows.” - Hannah Tinti

“An archetypal American novel, Huck Finn for the crystal-meth generation...a sad, often brutal, but oddly beautiful portrait of an America that’s forgotten only because we choose not to remember its continuing existence.” - Independent Extra

“Willy Vlautin, plumbs the depths of despair but finally rewards you with redemption.” - Sunday Mercury

“Spare and unadorned, but nevertheless poetic...full of boundless compassion for the dispossessed and rootless.” - Uncut Magazine (FIVE STARS)

“Willy Vlautin’s novels are clean as a bone, companionable, and profound. He is a master at paring loneliness and longing from his characters, issuing them through downturns, trials and transience without starving their humanity, and always sustaining them, and the reader, with ordinary hope.“ - Sarah Hall

“Arguably his best so far…If you like melancholy Americana Vlautin’s writing is for you.” - Bookseller (London), “Bookseller's Choice”

“Lean on Pete reminds me of the best parts of Gus Van Sant’s beautiful film My Own Private Idaho. Willy’s voice is pure and his stories universal. He never loses hope or heart and I believe every word he’s written.” - Barry Gifford

“For anyone with a sentimental attachment to beasts of an equine nature, a river of tears awaits.” - The List, UK