Brewster: A Novel - Hardcover

Slouka, Mark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393239756 ISBN 13: 9780393239751

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013

Synopsis

A 2013 Booklist Editors’ Choice: Best Adult Books for Young Adults

A powerful story about an unforgettable friendship between two teenage boys and their hopes for escape from a dead-end town.

The year is 1968. The world is changing, and sixteen-year-old Jon Mosher is determined to change with it. Racked by guilt over his older brother’s childhood death and stuck in the dead-end town of Brewster, New York, he turns his rage into victories running track. Meanwhile, Ray Cappicciano, a rebel as gifted with his fists as Jon is with his feet, is trying to take care of his baby brother while staying out of the way of his abusive, ex-cop father. When Jon and Ray form a tight friendship, they find in each other everything they lack at home, but it’s not until Ray falls in love with beautiful, headstrong Karen Dorsey that the three friends begin to dream of breaking away from Brewster for good. Freedom, however, has its price. As forces beyond their control begin to bear down on them, Jon sets off on the race of his life―a race to redeem his past and save them all.

Mark Slouka's work has been called "relentlessly observant, miraculously expressive" (New York Times Book Review). Reverberating with compassion, heartache, and grace, Brewster is an unforgettable coming-of-age story from one of our most compelling novelists.

About this title

About the Author

Mark Slouka’s most recent books are the story collection All That Is Left Is All That Matters, the memoir Nobody’s Son, and the award-winning novel Brewster. His work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Essays, and the PEN / O. Henry Prize Stories. He lives in Prague.

Review

“[I]ntense and elegiac novel... Slouka’s storytelling is sure and patient, deceptively steady and devastatingly agile.”
- New York Times Book Review

“Slouka’s laconic dialogue resonates with regional authenticity, his late-1960’s pop culture references ring true, and the stripped down prose style in his masterful coming-of-age novel recalls the likes of Tobias Wolff and Raymond Carver.”
- Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

“Reading Brewster is like entering the very heart of a Bruce Springsteen song―all grace, all depth, all sinew. Slouka―one of the great unsung writers of our time―has written a magnificent novel that woke my tired heart.”
- Colum McCann, National Book Award-winning author of Let the Great World Spin

“Terrific.... [W]here Slouka distinguishes himself as an author of particular sensitivity and significance is in how accurately and memorably he is able to conjure up a particular mood that has no doubt been felt in every era, not just the late '60s and early '70s. There is a timeless sense of yearning here.”
- Adam Langer, Boston Globe

“The dark undertow of Slouka’s prose makes Brewster instantly mesmerizing, a novel that whirls the reader into small-town, late 1960s America with mastery, originality, and heart.”
- Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Evocative... gorgeously written... both spare and highly dramatic. Slouka has an exceptional ear for the way kids talk, an eye for the detail of a not-so-recent past .... In Brewster, Slouka creates a messy miniature. It's a tight, little world where ...the subjects―human frailty, friendship, yearning, heart and love―don't make for easy poses. And you can't take your eyes from it.”
- John Barron, Chicago Tribune

“If ecstasy was Nabokov’s keynote, Slouka’s is passion. I can think of no one else who writes with such brazen fervor, with so much heart poured into every line. He is the perfect writer for a Passion Play about youth: youth’s ardor, youth’s anguish, youth’s nakedness. Brewster is that novel, and it blazes.”
- Brian Hall, author of Fall of Frost

“This beautifully written coming-of-age story sings with wisdom and heart. Slouka’s characters struggle to survive against a backdrop of remembered pain, routine violence and the threat of being drafted to Vietnam, fighting to retain a friendship that may just be able to save them.”
- Bonnie Jo Campbell, author of Once Upon a River

“[A] novel of stark and brutal truths...[Brewster] culminates in a scene of such visceral power and narrative force that this reader was left breathless. But perhaps Slouka's greatest accomplishment is his ability to blend his own authorial voice with the dialogue of his characters. It's as if the conversations that pass between Jon and Ray and Karen - about music, their plans for the future, their love and devotion to each other―are the lyrics to Slouka's melody. And what a beautiful and redemptive song it is.”
- Peter Geye, Minneapolis Star Tribune

“What Slouka also draws, with unerring accuracy, is the primacy of friendship and loyalty among teens who feel they are powerless. Slouka gives them a voice here, one filled with equal parts humor and pain.”
- Booklist, Starred Review

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0393239756
• ISBN 13: 9780393239751
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288