One of the Boys
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- 6,99 €
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- 6,99 €
Publisher Description
A father and his boys have won 'the war': the father's term for his bitter divorce and custody battle. They leave Kansas and drive through the night to their new apartment in Albuquerque. Settled in new schools, the brothers join basketball teams, make friends. Meanwhile their father works from home, smoking cheap cigars to hide another smell. Soon his missteps - the dead-eyed absentmindedness, the late-night noises, the comings and goings of increasingly odd characters - become sinister, and the boys find themselves watching him transform into someone they no longer recognize.
Set in the stark landscape of New Mexico and the family's cramped apartment, One of the Boys delivers a superbly nuanced portrait of a violent and menacing man, manipulating the world around him that it might service his idea of himself. Brutal and urgent, this masterful debut is a story of survival: two brothers driven to protect each other from the father they once trusted.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The unnamed boys of the title of Daniel Magariel's spare and piercing debut novel are the 12-year-old narrator, his older brother, and their father. The trio are headed from Kansas to New Mexico to begin a new life after a brutal divorce and custody battle referred to by the father as "the war." The narrator, complicit in lying about his mother's negligence so his father could gain custody, at first treats his new life like the adventure he was promised that it would be. But when his father's violent tendencies and severe drug addiction become increasingly apparent, the narrator finally begins to make sense of the divorce and the true source of the family's demise. The urgent present action of the novel in which the brothers adapt to their new life while tiptoeing around their erratic and largely absent father is combined with flashbacks portraying life before the family's collapse, ultimately creating a stunning and tragic portrait of both the joys and limitations of love.
