The Turnaround - Softcover

Pelecanos, George

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0316040924 ISBN 13: 9780316040921

Publisher: Back Bay Books, 2009

Synopsis

On a hot summer afternoon in 1972, three teenagers drove into an unfamiliar neighborhood and six lives were altered forever.
Thirty five years later, one survivor of that day reaches out to another, opening a door that could lead to salvation. But another survivor is now out of prison, looking for reparation in any form he can find it.
THE TURNAROUND takes us on a journey from the rock-and-soul streets of the '70s to the changing neighborhoods of D.C. today, from the diners and auto garages of the city to the inside of Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital, where wounded men and women have returned to the world in a time of war. A novel of fathers and sons, wives and husbands, loss, victory and violent redemption, THE TURNAROUND is another compelling, highly charged novel from George Pelecanos, "the best crime novelist in America." -Oregonian

About this title

About the Author

George Pelecanos is the author of several highly praised and bestselling novels, including The Cut, What It Was, The Way Home, The Turnaround, and The Night Gardener. He is also an independent-film producer, an essayist, and the recipient of numerous international writing awards. He was a producer and Emmy-nominated writer for The Wire and currently writes for the acclaimed HBO series Treme. He lives in Maryland.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* As in Drama City (2005), Pelecanos changes his focus a bit here from those who either commit crimes or attempt to solve them to those whose lives are altered by their proximity to crimes being committed. Alex Pappas is the hardworking owner of a D.C. diner he inherited from his even-harder-working father; Raymond Monroe is a hardworking physical therapist who had to work hardest of all to escape the fate of many of his friends in Montgomery County’s Heathrow Heights. One man is white, the other black; they don’t know one another, but they are linked by an incident that occurred in their teens, a senseless shooting that followed an equally senseless outburst of racial antagonism. Now it’s more than 40 years later, and the two are thrown together again, but this time in an attempt to prevent more violence. Throughout his career, Pelecanos has written again and again of the sense of inevitability that pervades so much inner-city violence: lives running on collision courses, individuals powerless to jump the tracks that poverty, prejudice, and ignorance have set them on. But this time he tells a different story. After starting more lives racing toward one another on those same tracks, he asks, What if we could change course? What if we could reroute our lives? It’s a daring premise, one fraught with the temptations of sentimentality and false hope, but Pelecanos tells this story of tentative reconciliation with the same unrelenting realism and concern for the roundness of his characters that have characterized the bleakest of his novels. Yes, Pelecanos is among our very best crime novelists, but he may become even more renowned for writing fiction about working-class America that is both beyond crime and beyond ideology. --Bill Ott

About this edition

• Publisher: Back Bay Books
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0316040924
• ISBN 13: 9780316040921
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 294