First published 2012
Guy Langton watches his older brother Dominic with bewilderment and unease. Dominic is everything Guy is not: handsome, proud, and utterly unpredictable. The family cannot fathom where Dominic fits or what destructive act he might commit next. As the brothers navigate the treacherous waters between adolescence and adulthood, Guy finds himself caught between loyalty and self-preservation. Dominic rebels against everything their privileged family represents, yet Guy sees glimpses of something deeper beneath his brother's defiant exterior. The tension builds as Dominic's actions threaten to tear apart the very foundations of their world. Martin Boyd crafts an elegant family drama that explores the contradictions of growing up and the painful recognition that nearly everyone between eighteen and thirty turns against their family, desperate to escape, only to long for that lost security decades later. At its heart, this is a story about the mystery of sibling bonds and the dark currents that run beneath the surface of even the most civilized families.
Genres: literary-fiction, 20th-century, adolescence, family-drama
Vibes: dark, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Period: 20th-Century
338 pages · Kindle Edition · Text