The Turnaround - Softcover

George P. Pelecanos

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0752897497 ISBN 13: 9780752897493

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group, 2008

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-roll streets of the 1970s to the changing neighborhoods of DC today, from the diners and auto garages of the city to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where wounded men and women have returned to the world in a time of war.

About this title

About the Author

George Pelecanos is an independent-film producer, an essayist, the recipient of numerous international writing awards, a producer and an Emmy-nominated writer on the HBO hit series The Wire, and the author of a bestselling series of novels set in and around Washington, D.C. (2008)

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: Orion Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0752897497
• ISBN 13: 9780752897493
• Binding: Paperback