A NOVEL BY ALEX GADD
He built a career that he once only dreamed of. Now, he has to decide what it’s worth.
At forty-nine, Zach Adler has mastered the game he’s spent decades playing. He’s a top-performing enterprise software salesperson with a carefully engineered path to retirement and a goal that he has come to equate with freedom.
Then the company he works for begins to change, and so does everything outside it.
Publication details coming soon.
About the Novel
Zach has spent years treating money as a way to keep score and retirement as a finish line. Success has given him security, status, and a goal he can measure against. But as a changing corporate culture challenges him to adapt to a new way of working, unexpected developments in his personal life bring challenges he has never had to navigate before.
As the different parts of his life begin to demand new things of him, Zach finds himself confronting a question that has always seemed simpler in theory than in practice:
How much is enough?
The Gristmill is an upmarket contemporary novel about work, ambition, money, music, love, and the choices we make in defining a successful life.
What The Gristmill Explores
Ambition and identity
How much of who we are is shaped by what we do?
Money and enough
When does the pursuit of financial security begin to determine the shape of a life?
Work and corporate culture
What happens when the rules for succeeding at work begin to change?
Music and reinvention
What can returning to an old passion reveal about who we are now?
Love in midlife
How do we make room for someone new in a life already fully formed?
Second acts
How do we think about change when the path we’re on still looks successful from the outside?
About Alex Gadd
Alex Gadd is a novelist, media entrepreneur, podcast host, musician, and longtime enterprise software sales and customer-success leader. He is the founder and president of World Highway Media and the creator and host of The Rock-N-Roll Show Podcast.
After more than twenty-five years in technology, sales, customer success, and leadership, he drew on that world—and his lifelong connection to music—to write The Gristmill.
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