Clay
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
The city is a strange place for Jozef. After living in a Polish village for much of his life, he is struggling to adjust to the tall, grey landscape of apartment living, and his job in a local deli serving french fries and fried chicken to brash, self-assured children makes him feel even more disconnected from the surrounding population. It is only when he encounters TC, a troubled boy running away from school, that Jozef finds a kindred spirit with whom he can share his fascination with the natural world.
The two are noticed in a small litter-strewn park by a friendly local, the elderly and recently widowed Sophia, who has been attempting to spark an interest in nature in her granddaughter, Daisy. While Sophia sends Daisy letters each week about the growth of the flowers in the park, Jozef attempts to extract, over games of chess, the details of TC's troubled home life-left broken by the departure of the boy's father. Like leaves twisting in the wind, the lives of these four figures are blown together, defying the gravity affecting the world around them. That is, until the pressures of modern life intervene.
A beautiful debut novel reflecting the destructive nature of humanity, and the indelible effects people can have on the environment and those around them, Clay poetically captures the delicate balances of life in the city, between young and old, between nature and development, between recklessness and caution.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The alluring pull of nature unites four strangers in this overly ambitious debut. At the center of it all is young TC, a lonely nine-year-old kid with an indifferent mother, absent father, and a penchant for skipping school to spend time in a city park, a place of solace for him. There he befriends Jozef, a Polish immigrant nostalgic for life back on his family's farm; recently widowed Sophia, who is more afraid of relying on her distant daughter than she is of her increasingly alarming heart palpitations (her husband died of a heart attack); and Sophia's precocious granddaughter, Daisy, sheltered by an overprotective mother but intensely curious about the world. As TC's home life unravels, he seeks a haven in the secret garden of the park, where he can live closer to nature, but an unfortunate misunderstanding brings the real world crashing down on everyone. Chapter titles named after traditional harvest feasts indicate the passing of time the novel unfolds over the course of a year and the pure and poetic descriptions of nature mark the changing seasons beautifully. Although Harrison's lush images of the natural world rescue the story somewhat, they leave little room for meaningful development of the characters or any real sense of connection between them.
