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Published Jun 2008
384 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
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.
"[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.
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Photo: Marion Ettlinger
Before finding his calling as a writer, Andre Dubus III (b. Oceanside,
California) worked for brief stints
as a bounty hunter, private investigator, carpenter, bartender, actor, and
teacher. His first book, The Cage Keeper and Other Stories, was published
in 1989, followed in 1993 by his first novel, Bluesman.
For the next few
years, he taught and did odd jobs as a carpenter while working on House of
Sand and Fog (a National Book Award finalist in 1999 and 2003 movie). Much of the book was written in his car, which he often parked
at a local cemetery in search of quiet and solitude. His characters were
inspired by two people whose predicaments had stuck in his mind for years: a
woman he read about in the newspaper who was wrongly evicted from her house and
forced to live in ...
... Full Biography
Author Interview
Link to Andre Dubus III's Website
Name Pronunciation
Andre Dubus III: ahn-dray duh-BYOOSE (last syllable rhymes with use)
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