Random

"Penn Jillette is an atheist, triple-goddamned lunatic, and his book is a glorious Las Vegas lunatic paean to chance and adventure--a page-turning, scabrous, hilarious ride into randomness." --Neil Gaiman

"Jillette's latest novel, Random, is about a young man who inherits his father's crushing debt to a loan shark and turns to dice--and other dangerous measures--to dig himself out. That the dice bring him luck sends him a new philosophy of leaving decisions both big and small up to chance." --New York Times

Two weeks before his twenty-first birthday, Las Vegas native Bobby Ingersoll finds out he's inherited a crushing gambling debt from his scumbag father. The debt is owed to an even scummier bag named Fraser Ruphart who oversees his bottom-rung criminal empire from the classy-adjacent Trump International Hotel. Bobby's prospects of paying off the note, which comes due the day he turns twenty-one, are about as dim as the sign on the hotel's facade.

The two weeks pass in the blink of a (snake) eye, but before Bobby's luck runs out, he stumbles upon enough cash to pay off Ruphart and change his family's fortune. More importantly, he finds himself with a new, for lack of a better word, faith.

Bobby does not consign his big break to a "higher power"--what Penn Jillette hero ever could? Instead, he devises and devotes himself to Random, a philosophy where his life choices are based entirely on the roll of his "lucky" dice. What follows is a rollicking exploration into not so much what defines us as what divines us when we give over every decision--from what to eat to whom to marry to how or when to die--to the random fall of two numbered cubes.

Random combines the intellectual curiosity of Richard Dawkins with the humor and grit of an Elmore Leonard antihero. Jillette's up-on-his-luck Ingersoll is the character we need to help us navigate the chaos of the post-truth era.

Well, unless his roll runs cold.