From the author of the PEN/Faulkner winning debut novel Preparation for the Next Life-a searing, tender, haunting story about fathers and sons, sons and mothers, and a young boy's struggle to become a man.
Corey Goltz is fifteen years old when his mother, Gloria, is diagnosed with ALS. Estranged from his father, and increasingly responsible for meeting both his mother's needs and his own, Corey is determined to be the hero Gloria needs -at any cost.
But when his father Leonard re-enters the picture, Corey's beliefs-about honor and love, duty and devotion, and the uses and misuses of power-are sorely tested. Charismatic and cruel, Leonard is a man of outsize influence and dubious moral character, a man whose neglect of his wife and son amounts to a kind of barbarism. The closer Corey gets to understanding his father's role in their family, the closer he comes to unmasking a violence that is beyond even his worst imaginings.
Set against the backdrop of a...