In Senior Year, Dan Shaughnessy focuses his acclaimed sports writing talents on his son Sam's senior year of high school, a turning point in any young life and certainly in the relationship between father and son. Using that experience, Shaughnessy circles back to his own boyhood and calls on the many sports greats he's known over the years -- Ted Williams, Roger Clemens, Larry Bird -- to capture that uniquely American rite of passage that is sports.Growing up, Dan Shaughnessy was so baseball-obsessed that he played games by himself and didn?ft even let himself win. His son, Sam Shaughnessy, came by his own love of sports naturally and was a natural hitter who quickly ascended the ranks of youth sports. Now nicknamed the 3-2 Kid for his astonishing ability to hover between success and failure in everything he does, Sam is finally a senior, and it's all on the line: what college to attend; how to keep his grades up and his head down until graduation; and whether his final high school baseball season, which features foul weather, a hitting slump, and a surprising clash with a longtime coach, will end in disappointment or triumph.All along the way, Dad is there, chronicling that universal experience of putting your child out on the field -- and in the world -- and hoping for the best. With gleaming insight, wicked humor, and, at times, the searching soul of an unsure father, Shaughnessy illuminates how sports connect generations and how they help us grow up -- and let go.
Dark family secrets come to light in this novel of "nearly Dickensian proportions" set in Paris, New York, and St. Petersburg (
The
New Yorker).
Thirty-two-year-old Gabriel Glover arrives in St. Petersburg from London to find his Russian mother dead in her apartment. Reeling from grief, Gabriel and his twin sister, Isabella, arrange the funeral-without contacting their manipulative and self-indulgent father, who is off living his own decadent life in France.
But unbeknownst to the twins, there is another family member out there. Their mother long ago abandoned a son, Arkady. Now he has grown into a pitiless predator, and is determined to claim his birthright. Aided by an ex-seminarian whose heroin addiction is destroying him, Arkady sets out to find the siblings and reveal the dark secret hidden from them their entire lives.
Winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize,
Pravda is a darkly funny and compulsively readable novel about love, loss, and the destructive legacy of deceit from the acclaimed author of
Let Go My Hand.
"A novel so vivid it glows in the dark-like truth." -
The Washington Post
