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In this taut and powerful novel, a young teenager is confronted by a terrible moral dilemma following a firearms accident at his home. Coerced by his mother to lie about his role in the incident, he finds he has nonetheless earned the admiration of a sinister group of boys at his school - calling themselves 'American Youth', they subscribe to a twisted notion of traditional, puritanical values. As he gets sucked into their orbit, and entangled with the girlfriend of the group's leader, he struggles to hold on to a sense of right and wrong.
Set in a New England town riven by social and ideological tensions - as newcomers encroach on an old rural culture - this is a classic portrait of a boy's rites of passage in an America ill at ease with itself.
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Review:
LaMarche is a young master -- of compression, of the essential American problems, of the heartfelt realist narrative. What an amazing, gratifying book -- we are lucky to have it. AMERICAN YOUTH proves that the novel is still our most vital way of communicating essential information, and LaMarche proves that there are still young geniuses among us, wringing new life from the old form. (George Saunders)
'Men have never written about becoming a man as Phil LaMarche does in this page-turning debut. He's the new Cormac McCarthy-in-waiting, wielding firearms with a muscular prose also evocative of Hemingway. The story runs hot as a pistol bore all the way through, with characters you can't bear to leave. At a time when so much fiction is chilly, ironic babbly, cobbled around ideology or written to wow a reader with the writer's pyrotechnic mastery of data, LaMarche's book is a heartfelt offering to the world.' (Mary Karr, author of THE LIAR'S CLUB)
'AMERICAN YOUTH is written with great psychological precision and insight. It is a portrait of a society in crisis and decay, but, more important, it is a gripping dramatisation of the relationship between a vulnerable and interesting protagonist and the hard world around him. He is someone on whom nothing is lost; in language both spare and truthful his plight is rendered fascinating and deeply convincing and memorable' (Colm Toibin)
AMERICAN YOUTH is a novel that demonstrates par excellence that the best writing is sometimes the simplest. A story of the individual, a story of America, it is one of those (all too) rare books that has stayed with me long after reading the last page. (Kate Atkinson)
Book Description:
'Men have never written about becoming a man as Phil LaMarche does in this page-turning debut. He's the new Cormac McCarthy-in-waiting, wielding firearms with a muscular prose also evocative of Hemingway. The story runs hot as a pistol bore all the way through, with characters you can't bear to leave. At a time when so much fiction is chilly, ironic babbly, cobbled around ideology or written to wow a reader with the writer's pyrotechnic mastery of data, LaMarche's book is a heartfelt offering to the world.' (Mary Karr, author of THE LIAR'S CLUB)
'AMERICAN YOUTH is written with great psychological precision and insight. It is a portrait of a society in crisis and decay, but, more important, it is a gripping dramatisation of the relationship between a vulnerable and interesting protagonist and the hard world around him. He is someone on whom nothing is lost; in language both spare and truthful his plight is rendered fascinating and deeply convincing and memorable' (Colm Toibin)
AMERICAN YOUTH is a novel that demonstrates par excellence that the best writing is sometimes the simplest. A story of the individual, a story of America, it is one of those (all too) rare books that has stayed with me long after reading the last page. (Kate Atkinson)
Destined to be a contemporary American classic - the gripping story of a moral dilemma which gives a profound insight into modern America
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- PublisherSceptre
- Publication date2007
- ISBN 10 034093803X
- ISBN 13 9780340938034
- BindingHardcover
- Number of pages240
- Rating
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