A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR - This "deeply
immersive novel" (The Washington Post) from the author of the
award-winning Preparation for the Next Life is an "epic coming-of-age
tale filled with pain, heartache, fear, and undying love" (The
Associated Press), as a young man's yearning to protect his dying
mother requires him to risk destroying his estranged, enigmatic,
powerful father.
"From its hypnotic opening pages, we find ourselves in the sure hands
of a roaming omniscient narrator, one who knows intimately the beating
hearts of its two central characters" --Andre Dubus III, The New York
Times Book Review
Corey Goltz grows up in the working-class outskirts of Boston as the
only child of Gloria, whose ambitions were derailed early but who has
always given her son everything she can. Corey, restless, dreams of
leaving home for a great adventure.
Instead, when he is fifteen, the world comes crashing down upon him,
when Gloria is diagnosed with ALS and, too late, his estranged father,
Leonard--a man of great charisma but dubious moral character--reenters
the picture. Determined to be his mother's hero at any cost, Corey
begins shouldering responsibility for her expensive medical care,
pushing himself to his physical and emotional limits as her disease
cruelly progresses. And as Leonard's influence over Corey grows, Corey
must dismantle the myth of his father's genius and confront the evil
that lurks beneath it.
Gritty, visceral, and profoundly stirring, The War for Gloria tells
the story of a young man, straddling childhood and adulthood, whose
yearning to protect his mother requires him to risk destroying his
father. An indelible work from a strikingly original voice in American
fiction.