We Are All Of Us Left Behind by Bradley Somer
Reviewed by Emily Weedon
“Only one of these is true, which is okay.”
It is a phrase repeated often enough to become a motif in Bradley Somer’s masterfully written novel, We Are All Of Us Left Behind. He takes us intimately, deeply inside the life and yearnings of a young man who we only ever know as “Molly”. But he is only posing online as Molly, and his pretense will soon cause him trouble. The layers of unreliable narration thus close upon themselves like petals in a story of longing and searching and loneliness, one boy ceaselessly seeking meaning and belonging across arid landscapes and faceless airports.
“Somer made me feel deeply for his character, brought me to deep catharsis and pathos. He made me walk in shoes I could never otherwise have worn.”
Parched for guidance and friendship, his travels take him from rural Alberta to Europe, skating on a few dollars and the fumes of hope. Everything this poor, misguided kid does seems destined to make things worse for him. Somers thereby adeptly casts the reader into a caretaker role, exquisitely, sometimes to the point of cringe, painfully aware that the boy is making mistake after mistake.
There is a ruggedness to the landscape in We Are All Of Us Left Behind which brings to mind the sere, hardscrabble pumice set pieces of Cormack McCarthy. Somer’s prose whistles clean as wire fencing alone on a barren desert. There is something of Camus’ L’Etranger in the quality of the writing: a perfectly outside outsider alienated from all he sees, hoping for something closer even as he recoils from possible danger.
“Through the traffic in jolts, my feet won’t touch these streets again, just hover here, above them. I wipe my cheek and it’s wet….On the freeway to the airport, I’m gone from Rome. I’m gone from Maria and Eva, I’m gone from Sam.” Somers writes. The use of ‘I’m gone’ was so effective – vernacular for the character, but theme stated so well, I paused here for a while, to ponder the swiftness and confusion of life.
Fans of Chuck Pahlaniuk will enjoy the daring, brisk, masculine way with prose and situations the main character endures. Somers is unflinching and finds poetry in harsh beats, like the protagonist’s blood left in the sand for red ants to consume.
What struck me most forcefully was how lonely the boy in Somer’s book is, searching as he does for what family he has, after a lifetime of floating, neglected, lost without kin or a sense of who he is or what he wants. Moments when the boy reflects upon his loneliness, when he names it for what it is, are deeply affecting. In a world of books which trade in trauma sometimes at the expense of plot, We Are All Of Us Left Behind broke me open to cry, creating as it does such deep pathos for a character who is himself extremely sanguine about his predicament. The boy moves through his life a little bit of a ghost, at a remove from even the most intimate things happening to him, whether they be violence or lust or tenderness. The shock of those who will never completely recover from traumas planted deeply in childhood.
Somer made me feel deeply for his character, brought me to deep catharsis and pathos. He made me walk in shoes I could never otherwise have worn.
The pace in Book One, when the main character is holed up in an Alberta motel, haunted by his past, a phantom in his own life and hunted by a terrifying antagonist, is relentless. Twists and turnarounds come fresh and unexpected, fueled by the ill-formed ideas only an adolescent can have when faced with adversity.
In Book Two the pace slows to a dreamy, melancholy one as the boy floats to another continent, unprepared, with only magical thinking to keep him warm. All the way through features of the world turn sensory detail to art:
“The candy neon cobblestones heave to trip me up. Each step is wet, raggedy rectangle outlines, cinnamon-heart red and lemon-drop yellow.”
Divided into several books, the episodes in the boy’s life each have a distinct flavour, though all of them share that floating L’Etranger effect which I believe Somers uses to show that we are all of us babes in the woods, ill-equipped and unprepared to meet the hostilities life can throw at us. Sometimes, everything is trying to kill us, and more so when we are outside of everything, family, shared experience, kin, kith. I say kith last because what the boy years for most of all is a natural affinity with others. Brutal as some parts of the book necessarily are, Somers shows us radical kindness and closeness as well. The boy does encounter a person who shows him such simple human kindness. The book slows down for this section and the reader is wary as a rescue dog after all that has come before, expecting doom. Yet, it is here that Somers achieves utter lyricism.
I felt changed by this book, softened, expanded, held by the prose and lifted by its art. It may be true that We Are All Of Us Left Behind, but Bradley Somer’s stunning book will never leave you.
About the Author
Bradley Somer’s novels have been published in over twenty countries, translated into several languages, and produced in many print, digital, and audio editions. A few are even in development for screen. His work was awarded the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction, and he was honoured to receive the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta’s Award for Emerging Artist. Bradley holds degrees in Archaeology and Anthropology, where his studies focused on paleoenvironments and human prehistory in North America. He has worked in cultural resource management, real estate, landscaping, and has also slung dough in late night pizza joints, all the while writing and editing and writing some more.
About the Reviewer
Emily A. Weedon is the CSA award–winning screenwriter of Chateau Laurier and Red Ketchup, and the author of the epic dystopia Autokrator. She played Lucy in two separate productions of Dracula, and growing up probably checked out Dracula and other vampire books more than anyone else in the Coe Hill library, so it was inevitable that she would write a novel about vampires. Hemo Sapiens is her second novel. She lives in Toronto.
Book Details
Publisher : Freehand Books
Publication date : Sept. 1 2025
Language : English
Print length : 320 pages
ISBN-10 : 1990601928
ISBN-13 : 978-1990601927