Thief of Dreams: A Novel - Softcover

Yount, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1504007034 ISBN 13: 9781504007030

Publisher: Open Road Media, 2014

Synopsis

The tender, engaging story of a family in pain and a boy whose quest for courage leads him deep into the wilds of Appalachia

In 1948 Madeline Tally leaves her philandering husband and returns home to North Carolina, where she and her thirteen-year-old son, James, move into an ugly purple trailer in the cow pasture behind her father’s farmhouse. Smart and sensitive, James worries that he is somehow responsible for his parents’ separation and feels out of place in the town where he grew up but has not been back to for five years. None of his old friends have time for him anymore, and his only new one is Lester Buck, a poor, peculiar boy who shares James’s love of the outdoors.

In Pittsburgh, Edward Tally spends his nights drinking with his fellow construction workers in the bar downstairs from his new apartment. He tries to tell himself that he is better off without Madeline and James, that he wants to be his own man again, free of the expectations that he was never able to meet. But there is a burden on his heart that cannot be eased by booze or by Paris Pergola, the seductive, moody blonde he has taken up with.

Told from the alternating perspectives of the three Tallys, Thief of Dreams builds to a stunning climax as Edward comes to North Carolina to try to win back his family, and James and Lester get into a vicious fight with a schoolyard bully. With his friend in the hospital and his parents unable to bridge the divide between them, James heads into the frozen forest. What he discovers there will give him enough wisdom and experience to last a lifetime, if he can only make it back to his family alive.

About this title

About the Author

John Yount is the author of five critically acclaimed novels: Wolf at the Door, The Trapper’s Last Shot, Hardcastle, Toots in Solitude, and Thief of Dreams. A longtime professor at the University of New Hampshire, he has been the recipient of grants from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts. According to John Irving, Yount is “a completely original voice in contemporary American fiction.”

From Library Journal

This novel by the author of Hardcastle (St. Martin's, 1984) and Toots in Solitude ( LJ 1/84) is what a plain-writing William Faulkner might have done. Madeline Tally has gone back in a trailer to her parents' hill farm in 1948 North Carolina with her 13-year-old son James after leaving her drunken, wandering husband, Edward. But running away is not enough, and both Madeline and Edward find that absence still makes the heart grow fonder. This confounds James, who, in turn, runs away to confront nature, thinking it simpler, only to run afoul of its impersonality. All learn which dreams, or feelings, are to be taken seriously, which kept in their place. The narrative technique recalls Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, while James's maturation by confronting nature, along with vivid hunting and fishing scenes, evokes Go Down, Moses. Warm, human; recommended in its own right.
- Kenneth Mintz, formerly with Bayonne
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1504007034
• ISBN 13: 9781504007030
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 295