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Shop nowThe Boy Who Went Away
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Learn moreWinner of the American Academy’s Rome Prize for fiction, The Boy Who Went Away is Eli Gottlieb’s tender, harrowing coming-of-age novel.
For Denny Graubert, the chaotic summer of 1967—when the screams of napalm bombs on the nightly news drowned the cheers of the All-Star game—brings the painful realization that childhood has passed. While engaging in his favorite domestic spying game, Denny unwittingly discovers the desperate measures his mother will take to save his autistic older brother, Fad, who is lost in the diagnostic Dark Ages of Austism. At the heart of this novel is not only the story of Denny’s coltish entrance to adolescence, but also that of his relationship with Fad, which will be forever changed during the course of that summer. The Boy Who Went Away is the cruelly antic, heartrending story of two childhoods that would, by fall’s arrival, be irretrievably lost.
Two decades after his debut novel, The Boy Who Went Away, won the Rome Prize, Eli Gottlieb returns to the subject of autism in this inspired new novel. Gottlieb lives in New York.
Chris Patton has been a voiceover artist for over fifteen years and has acted onstage most of his life. A two-time Audie nominee and the winner of an Earphones award, he's voiced over one hundred audiobooks, over two hundred anime titles, many commercials, a handful of video games, and many e-learning and corporate training projects. The frontman and lyricist for the synthpop band Paul Lynde is Dead, he lives in Maryland but is a native Texan.
Reviews
“Beautiful for its compassion and insights.”
“Gottlieb records the utterly confounding and inevitable plunge into adulthood with bold clarity. He depicts the spoken and unspoken language of cruelty and love in a family with confidence and poetry. But he is at his very best in the freshness of his imagery, creating a world so vivid and memorable the reader finds all five senses delightfully engaged in experiencing it.”
“This intense coming-of-age novel oozes with allusions to late-1960s politics and culture.”
“A first novel about dysfunctional family life and coming of age in suburbia that relies on careful writing and a sly wit to distinguish itself from other narratives in this most contemporary of genres…Gottlieb allows his story to find its proper length—which is short—and builds to the right emotional crescendo. A fine little book.”
“Eli Gottlieb is an enthralling stylist whose characters are shockingly, electrically alive.”
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