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by Kevin Moffett
Florida, 1982. A nine-year-old watches as his dead father's possessions are hauled away: his clothes and tools, his faux-leather recliner. His sensei says it's a perfect time to turn his weaknesses into weapons.
His PE teacher says he runs like a pregnant ostrich. His mother takes out a personal ad. Everyone is trying to teach him a lesson but he is, it seems, a slow learner. Meanwhile, with each passing day, his father recedes, growing less and less plausible, almost a myth.
Twenty-five years later, adrift in suburban Southern California, married with a son of his own, he's still trying to sort through the fragments of his father's death while imparting his own sketchy education onto his son. Which snakes are poisonous? Why did I tell him that Candyland is based on a true story? Why has he stopped asking me to go skateboarding with him and his friends? After discovering a travel journal he didn't know his father kept, he and his son light out on a road trip, retracing the father's mystifying journey.
They drive up the Pacific Coast, foggy, overtaken by beauty. As he strains to decipher his father's notes, his relationship with his son begins to take on new heft and shape. With wit and compassion, Moffett delivers a bracingly intimate account of fatherhood, and discovery, and the experiences of two men far from home.
"Humor gives this stirring meditation on the nature of familial relations a playful, biting edge." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Kevin Moffett's Only Son perfectly captures the long ache of fatherhood in all its baffling beauty. It's an extraordinary book about the sometimes tender, sometimes distant, always mysterious relationship between fathers and sons, written with wit and warmth and just enough sting to make it real." ―Nathan Hill, author of The Nix
"Only Son collapses generations, fuses time. Mesmerizing and profound, this delicate, fervent book about fatherhood, and sonhood, exerts the thrumming power of a spiritual text, one quietly evoked by daily interactions with wonder, promise, and loss." ―Heidi Julavits, author of Directions to Myself
This information about Only Son was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Kevin Moffett is the author of two short story collections, as well as The Silent History, a narrative app for mobile devices. His work has been awarded the National Magazine Award, the Nelson Algren Award, and a literature fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts. He teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Virginia and lives in Charlottesville.
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