Furnace Creek
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Eyewear Publishing
Published:21st Feb '22
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
“A genuine accomplishment”—Michael Cunningham “A joyously ambitious debut!”—Marianne Wiggins “I was . . . most of all, seduced”—Viet Nguyen “Exquisite prose”—Publishers Weekly “Lyrical and inventive”—Kirkus Reviews
This moving novel teases us with the question of what Dickens’ Pip might have been like if he had grown up in the American South of the 1960s and 1970s and faced the explosive social issues that galvanized the world in those decades: racial injustice, a war abroad, women’s and gay rights, class struggle.
This moving novel teases us with the question of what Dickens’ Pip might have been like if he had
grown up in the American South of the 1960s and 1970s and faced the explosive social issues that
galvanized the world in those decades: racial injustice, a war abroad, women’s and gay rights, class
struggle.
A guilty encounter with an escaped felon, a summer spent working for an eccentric man with a
mysterious past, conflicted erotic feelings for his employer’s niece and nephew—these events set
the stage for a journey of sexual and moral discovery that takes Newt Seward to New England,
Rome, and Paris—all before returning home to confront his life’s many expectations and surprises.
Furnace Creek effortlessly combines elements of coming-of-age story, novel of erotic discovery,
Southern Gothic fiction, and detection-mystery plot. Written with a natural storyteller’s gift of
imagination, it leaps the frame of Dickens’ masterpiece to capture the emotional intensity of
characters whose lives will haunt the reader beyond the page.
Stretching from the American South to the Ivy League and the dream of Rome and Paris, Furnace Creek is a sweeping, Gothic tale of sex, race, and a young man’s education. I was totally entertained and, most of all, seduced. -- Viet Nguyen * Pulitzer Prize for The Sympathizer *
Joseph Boone has written a page-turning novel, a spirited American retelling of an English classic. The American South is our own Dickensian England, and Boone brings both worlds vividly alive with his ebullient prose. A joyously ambitious debut!
-- Marianne Wiggins * Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award nominee for Evidence of Things Unseen *Joe Boone’s Furnace Creek is a funny, moving, and true rendition of everybody’s story: surviving our
childhoods, which can be uniquely challenging if you’re Southern, and queer. Boone is a natural novelist,
and Furnace Creek is a genuine accomplishment.
"Furnace Creek has everything brilliant novels have: characters we love, a story that touches the reader deeply, and a haunting quality that reaches beyond the pages, informing our current lives. It is also wickedly funny, that rare novel full of charming humor and sharp cultural commentary, masterful at every turn."
-- - Dana Johnson, Winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and author of Elsewhere, California“A playful reimagining of Dickens, a tautly plotted thriller, a beautifully observed coming of age story: Furnace Creek is a novel that is as hard to categorize as it is to put down. It seizes you in the opening chapters and refuses to let you go.”
-- - Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Booker Prize Judge and the author of Becoming Dickens“A queer bildungsroman in a classic, stylish package. Boone’s prose is lyrical and inventive,
merging Dickensian wit and texture with a dash of Southern gothic. Just the sort of novel with
which bibliophiles will be happy to linger.”
“With lyric beauty, welcome frankness, and rare emotional urgency, Boone reimagines
Dickens’s Great Expectations in the American South, in the tumultuous 1960s, with a queer
perspective and countless new and illuminating approaches. Boone’s . . . innovations are always
true to the realities of class, race, and sexuality of its milieu."
Dickens for the Civil Rights–Era South
-- - Los Angeles Review of Books- Commended for Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards (LGBTQ+ Fiction) 2022
ISBN: 9781913606350
Dimensions: 240mm x 165mm x 30mm
Weight: 870g
485 pages