We are Pirates

A boat has gone missing. Goods have been stolen. There is blood in the water. It is the twenty-first century and a crew of pirates is terrorizing the San Francisco Bay.

Phil is a husband, a father, a struggling radio producer and the owner of a large condo with a view of the water. But he'd like to be a rebel and a fortune hunter.

Gwen is his daughter. She's fourteen. She's a student, a swimmer and a best friend. But she'd like to be an adventurer and an outlaw.

Phil teams up with his young, attractive assistant. They head for the open road, attending a conference to seal a deal.

Gwen teams up with a new, fierce friend and some restless souls. They head for the open sea, stealing a boat to hunt for treasure.

We Are Pirates! is a novel about our desperate searches for happiness and freedom, about our wild journeys beyond the boundaries of our ordinary lives.

Also, it's about a teenage girl who pulls together a ragtag crew to commit mayhem in the San Francisco Bay, while her hapless father tries to get her home.

“Honest and funny, dark and painful, We Are Pirates reads like the result of a nightmarish mating experiment between Joseph Heller and Captain Jack Sparrow.? It's the strangest, most brilliant offering yet from the mind behind Lemony Snicket” – Neil Gaiman

“Daniel Handler turns whimsy into wisdom and the fantastic into the great. He is, of course, a genius” – Lorrie Moore

“We Are Pirates will dazzle, disturb and delight you. It might even do things to you that don't start with the letter D, like remind you what it's like to be young, or convince you that Daniel Handler can do anything” – Jess Walter, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins

“There is no writer quite like Daniel Handler. Somehow he manages to work at the intersection of irony and wonderment, whimsy and menace – a space I'm not sure I knew existed until I read his work” – Jennifer Egan, author of A Visit from the Goon Squad

“It's been a long time since I read a book quite as crazy as We Are Pirates. It manages to be funny, weird, dark and moving all at once. It's a wild and anarchic ride, as gleefully out-of-step with much literary fiction as a pirate galleon amid a fleet of sailing dinghies, and all the better for it. I loved it” – Matt Haig, author of The Humans

“I finished it. I devoured it. I loved it! We Are Pirates is extraordinary. I sat there wondering how something could be so dispassionate, and yet so heartfelt at the same time. And then, the next second, it made me laugh out loud. Remarkable story, remarkable characters, remarkable prose. I'll carry it in my head for ever” – Russell T Davies

“A macabre, darkly human portrayal of family dynamics and growing up in a world running low on adventure … Handler, as Lemony Snicket, has always been popular with adult readers as well as YAs, and that situation should prove true of this new novel” – Booklist