Running the Bulls: A Novel (Hardscrabble Books) - Hardcover

One year and six days into an unsatisfactory retirement, Howard Woods is awakened by his wife in the early hours of the morning to hear the news of a decades-old betrayal. He does not take it well. Howard upends his well-ordered life and, to the dismay of his family, announces his intention of traveling to Spain to join the annual running of the bulls in Pamplona.

Having thrown his life into chaos, Howard finds that his wife is no longer willing to restore it to order as she has always done in the past. He is now miserably committed to a Hemingway-inspired course of his own choosing but with little idea of how to change it or to achieve the resolution he desires. Instead of at home where he wishes to be, he ends up living at the Holiday Inn.

How does a middle-aged man of the Eisenhower era (who still can't do his own laundry) survive in the age of cell phones and cable TV? The result is hilarious and, at times, achingly poignant.

Cathie Pelletier's novels have been praised as "hilarious, generous and genuine" (New Yorker), "bitingly original" (Vogue), "masterful," (Washington Post), and "funny and unexpectedly moving" (New York Times). She is "absolutely, inherently funny," says the Los Angeles Times, "yet she can walk the tightrope between humor and grief without once losing her balance." In Running the Bulls, she is in top form.