A stunning debut novel about obsessional passion and a morally ambiguous love, about an upstanding family man in an Indiana town who finds himself caught in the grip of desire for a young boy.
Dave Brewer, married to Tara--they have an eighteen-month-old daughter--is a meter reader for Indiana Gas. He helps his ailing father. He drives a bus for the Norris Road Baptist Church. He enjoys a good round of golf. He has everything he wants: family, community, a steady job. Until one day at a public pool, he sees a boy, a quiet loner, in whom he sees himself.
The boy, Nathan, has cut his foot at the pool. Something in his scared, innocent eyes awakens a powerful compassion in Dave that gradually emerges as something more: an obsession both physical and spiritual .
As his interest in Nathan evolves from sympathy to love, Dave can no longer deny the complexity of his feelings--he desires Nathan at the same time that he wants to save him. His feelings for the boy--summoning up a crucial, long-forgotten memory from his own boyhood--propel him into the crisis of his life.
What happens is told in a shocking but fully human story of the power of love and the fragility of innocence.
A stunning debut novel about obsessional passion and a morally ambiguous love, about an upstanding family man in an Indiana town who finds himself caught in the grip of desire for a young boy.
Dave Brewer, married to Tara--they have an eighteen-month-old daughter--is a meter reader for Indiana Gas. He helps his ailing father. He drives a bus for the Norris Road Baptist Church. He enjoys a good round of golf. He has everything he wants: family, community, a steady job. Until one day at a public pool, he sees a boy, a quiet loner, in whom he sees himself.
The boy, Nathan, has cut his foot at the pool. Something in his scared, innocent eyes awakens a powerful compassion in Dave that gradually emerges as something more: an obsession both physical and spiritual .
As his interest in Nathan evolves from sympathy to love, Dave can no longer deny the complexity of his feelings--he desires Nathan at the same time that he wants to save him. His feelings for the boy--summoning up a crucial, long-forgotten memory from his own boyhood--propel him into the crisis of his life.
What happens is told in a shocking but fully human story of the power of love and the fragility of innocence.