David Tonjes

Debut Author

 GIMMEE SHELTER

Annapolis, 1984. A waitress with a commune in her past and a teenage daughter in her present falls for the new bartender, and together they make a series of reasonable decisions — about money, about cocaine, about each other — that will cost more than either of them has to pay.

Agent: Dean Marrow, Marrow Creative, marrowcreativeagency.com 

299,000 words, 304 manuscript pages. Available for acquisition.

Other work in development:

The Cheese Store (undergoing major edit)

It is 1971. A boy and a girl sit next to each other on a flat-top radiator in tenth grade social studies class. Will they? Won’t they? Mary Beth has a secret, key elements of which are known to just about everyone. Baby has a mother, a self-supporting landscape painter who drinks much too much. He and his friends abuse various substances, albeit without too many permanent negative impacts until there is one awful night where many things go wrong. The back drop to it all is that Richard Nixon is president, the war and the draft continue, and the idealism of the 1960s fades into a more pragmatic, cynical decade. And Leo, a serial avant garde retailer late of California, Denver, and Philadelphia, has opened a store to sell cheese – and cheese only! in this north shore Long Island village. This episodic, multiple point of view ~100,000 word novel has a through-line theme: the search for freedom for self, the searching mediated by consumed substances, nascent social movements such as women’s liberation and ecology, and, perhaps paradoxically, seeking for meaningful relations with another.

Lost and Found (75% composed first draft)

A research project into the composition of garbage across New York State is conducted by an academic team composed of four young women. They travel, learn, grow, and change over the course of a year as they interact with their beloved Professor. And some of the objects they find have their own stories to tell.

Topologies (begun)

A love triangle in a university causes a graduate student to flee cross-country by bicycle as he develops a course in foundational mathematics.