Abroad

Skip Burton stares at the clues to his previous life. A fraying French leaflet. An ancient Mexican mitt. A smudged note from an Indonesian shaman. A life he loved but hid from his eighteen-year old daughter and buried deep within himself for decades. He watches Jen dig a final artifact from the long-forgotten box and gasp. She holds up an old photo of her mother on her way to Japan. A place her mother claimed she had never been. Skip steels himself to reveal the story behind his darkest secret: He betrayed Jen's beloved mother when she needed him most.

ABROAD chronicles the loves, losses, and friendships of Skip, his best friend, Maddie Erickson, and his bane, Rex Moreno, as they grow from adolescence to adulthood and encounter the thrill, lighthearted humor, and occasional trauma of living and working in pre-globalized France, Asia, and Mexico.

Told through interconnected stories steeped in the cultural upheaval and sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s, the novel examines how world travel upends the preconceptions of youth and one's home culture, while seeking to answer two questions: Can we ever truly understand someone from a different culture, and can we ever truly understand ourselves if we don't try?

GREYSON BRYAN is an international lawyer with a B.A. from Stanford and a J.D. from Harvard, who lived and worked for many years in Europe and Asia. A longtime L.A. resident, he is the author of the BIG financial thriller series, including BIG: Beginnings, BIG: Crisis and Ending BIG. Abroad is his fourth novel.

Praise for BIG: Beginnings:

"International lawyer Bryan puts his professional experience to good use in his engrossing first novel and series launch. . . Readers will root for the sympathetic Duncan [Luke] as he morphs into a more grounded version of James Bond or Jason Bourne." -Publishers Weekly