Bøger af Paul Cody

Oliver Curtin grows up in a nocturnal world with a mother who is a sex worker and drug addict, and whose love is real yet increasingly unreliable. His narration alternates between that troubled childhood and the present of the novel, where he is serving the last months of a thirty-years-to-life sentence in a maximum-security prison in upstate New York, for a crime he committed at age seventeen. His redemption is closely allied with his memories, seen with growing clarity and courage. If he can remember, then life in the larger world is possible for him.

In late middle age, after a quarter-century clean and sober, novelist Paul Cody found himself lost in the fog of prescription drug addiction. He went to a rehab in the hills of Pennsylvania, and during a 37-day stay there he encountered doctors and soldiers and bartenders, MMA fighters and lawyers and businessmen-who were also junkies and huffers, coke heads and meth heads, drunks and pill-poppers and generalized dope fiends. He saw degradation and despair and hope and grace. And, with growing clarity, he began to see their humanity, as well as his own.

Trey Burnes grew up above a funeral home run by his strange and sometimes frightening parents. Now 17, he's locked up on an adolescent psychiatric ward, where he tries to remember an often traumatic past-including, perhaps, an attempt on his life. As Trey relives his shadowed childhood, lit by moments of love and grace, he struggles to come to terms with the past and imagine how-whether-he can return to the world.