One early September night in Florida, a stripper brings her daughter to work. April's usual babysitter is in the hospital, so she decides it's best to have her three-year-old daughter close by, watching children's videos in the office, while she works.
Except that April works at the Puma Club for Men. And tonight she has an unusual client, a foreigner both remote and too personal, and free with his money. Lots of it, all cash. His name is Bassam. Meanwhile, another man, AJ, has been thrown out of the club for holding hands with his favorite stripper, and he's drunk and angry and lonely.
From these explosive elements comes a relentless, raw, searing, passionate, page-turning narrative, a big-hearted and painful novel about sex and parenthood and honor and masculinity. Set in the seamy underside of American life at the moment before the world changed, it juxtaposes lust for domination with hunger for connection, sexual violence with family love. It seizes the reader by the throat with the same psychological tension, depth, and realism that characterized Andre Dubus's #1 bestseller, House of Sand and Fog—and an even greater sense of the dark and anguished places in the human heart.
BOOK REVIEWS
Media Reviews
"[D]oom and desperation are in plentiful supply from page one, and as the novel fades to black, the reader's left with a roster of sadder-but-wiser Americans to contemplate." - Publishers Weekly.
"Starred Review. Difficult to put down, impossible to forget." - Kirkus Reviews.
"The anger of other characters in “The Garden of Last Days” refracts some of Bassam’s inner turmoil. To that extent this book’s ambitions are clear. Yet its inability to grasp and fathom its true subject means that when the cataclysm arrives on 9/11, its dramatic effect is both unearned and long overdue. And when April/Spring is at long last asked about the man she knew so briefly but shatteringly, all she can provide is a platitude. He was “like a boy,” she says. “Just some drunk and lonely boy." - Janet Maslin, New York Times.
"The Garden of Last Days is storytelling of the finest kind: unforgettable and desperate characters caught up in a plot thundering toward catastrophe. Maybe the end of the novel is rushed, or maybe I think it is because I wanted to read another hundred pages." - The Boston Globe.
Sadly, The Garden of Last Days received a no vote from BookBrowse's reviewer, who felt that it "read like a really bad, sensationalized soap opera."
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