"With a birder's eye for detail, White takes us on [Adrian Mandrick's] painful, near-death descent...a shocking climax... White's life-affirming conclusion reminds us that endangered species aren't the only ones that need to change and adapt in order to survive."
—The New York Times Book Review
Fusing wry humor and family drama with elements of mystery and environmental adventure, The Life List of Adrian Mandrick follows a self-destructive top-level birder on a convoluted journey toward grace. With a compressed narrative style, and themes as urgent as its pace, it explores the ways we humans lose sight of what’s most essential in the face of our own fears:
Anesthesiologist Adrian Mandrick, addicted to the very pain medication he prescribes, is filled with contradictory impulses. He wants to be a good husband to his wife, a good father to his children, to forgive the crime his once-beloved mother committed and the long-lost father who accused her. But his pills get in the way, and all he wants to think about is his life list—that all-encompassing chronicle of 863 bird species he’s spotted and verified. When a search for an extremely rare Ivory-billed Woodpecker—the same bird he and his mother believed they spotted in the fondest memory from his childhood—leaves him stranded in the thick swamplands of Florida’s panhandle, Adrian will be forced to confront his tumultuous past and present failures and question what is really important in his life.
The book won the 2020 Indiana Authors Award for Fiction ,was named one of the Chicago Review's most anticipated fiction books of 2018, and was runner-up for the Faulkner Society's Gold Medal for Novel. Please see Media Page for complete reviews.
