Furnace Creek

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.

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

Joseph Boone has written a page-turning novel, a spirited American retelling of an English classic. The American South is our own Dickensian England, and Boone brings both worlds vividly alive with his ebullient prose. A joyously ambitious debut!--Marianne Wiggins, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award nominee for Evidence of Things Unseen, Joe Boone's 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

Fiction. California Interest.