Description Hide Description- Show Description+
Taking its inspiration from Great Expectations, this novel teases us with the question of what Pip might have been like had he grown up in the American South of the 1960s and 1970s and faced the explosive social issues--racial injustice, a war abroad, women's and gay rights, class struggle--that galvanized the world in those decades.
A guilty encounter with an escaped felon, a summer spent working for an eccentric man with a mysterious past, conflicted erotic feelings for his employer's niece and nephew--these events set the stage for a journey of sexual and moral discovery that takes Newt Seward to New England, Rome, and Paris--all before returning home to confront his life's many expectations and disappointments.
Deftly combining elements of coming-of-age story, novel of erotic discovery, Southern Gothic fiction, and detection-mystery thriller, FURNACE CREEK leaps the frame of Dickens' masterpiece to provide a contemporary meditation on the perils of desire, ambition, love, loss, and family.
Author: Joseph Allen Boone
Paperback Published 28 February 2023 374 pages
Originally published in hardcover 25 March 2022
“FURNACE CREEK is a funny, moving, and true rendition of everybody’s story: surviving our childhoods, which can be uniquely challenging if you’re Southern, and queer. Boone is a natural novelist, and Furnace Creek is a genuine accomplishment.”- Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize for THE HOURS
“A playful reimagining of Dickens, a tautly plotted thriller, a beautifully observed coming of age story: FURNACE CREEK is a novel that is as hard to categorize as it is to put down. It seizes you in the opening chapters and refuses to let you go.” - Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Booker Prize Judge and the author of BECOMING DICKENS
“Stretching from the American South to the Ivy League and the dream of Rome and Paris, FURNACE CREEK is a sweeping, Gothic tale of sex, race, and a young man’s education. I was totally entertained and, most of all, seduced.” - Viet Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize for THE SYMPATHIZER