White Guys - Softcover

Giardina, Antho

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0434016055 ISBN 13: 9780434016051

Publisher: William Heinemann Ltd, 2006

Synopsis

Back in hardscrabble Winship, Massachusetts, in the early 1970's, Billy Mogavero was everything his friends wanted to be - tough, sexy, graceful, a leader of young men. Twenty years later, the four teenagers who followed him around have all made it out of Winship. Have made it, period. Only Billy's stayed behind. Now he's a paint salesman, living at home with his mentally handicapped brother. When the guys go back to visit the old neighbourhood, their reunion gives Billy's life a second act in yuppie Boston, where his charm catapults him into the respectability that they've been working for all their lives. No-one is more enthralled by Billy's success than his old best friend, Timmy O'Kane. As he watches Billy move up in the mall development business and marry a woman who's every bit his match for nerve and daring, Timmy feels the limitations of his own safe life: his quiet career selling textbooks, his sensible marriage into a well-to-do family and a cozy suburb. But after Billy and his pregnant wife are victims of a drive-by shooting, which only Billy survives, Timmy is ensnared in a series of events that threatens to bring his life tumbling down around him - a risk that is both terrifying and terrifyingly seductive...

About this title

Review:

"Brilliantly captures both the aspiration and self-loathing of the upwardly mobile American male" (Michael Arditti Independent)

"There is a tender immediacy to his prose, and White Guys is studded with beautifully observed moments...alert to the slightest emotional nuance between men, and between husbands and wives and parents and children" (Daily Telegraph)

"Giardina has an extraordinary gift for describing the eddies of power in what seem to be familiar relationships" (David Hare)

"I love men who can write about relationships as tenderly and honestly as Giardina does" (Julie Myerson)

"Smart... Compelling... Perfectly handled" (San Francisco Chronicle)

From the Publisher:

A strikingly powerful novel of male friendship and loyalty from Anthony Giardina, the acclaimed author of The Country of Marriage, an American novelist in the tradition of Cheever and Updike

About this edition

• Publisher: William Heinemann Ltd
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0434016055
• ISBN 13: 9780434016051
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384