The Car Thief

By: Theodore Weesner

Sign Up Now! Already a Member? Log In
You must be logged into Bookshare to access this title. Learn about membership options, or view our freely available titles.

Synopsis: In “one of the great coming-of-age novels of the twentieth century,” an estranged father and son struggle to get by in 1950s Michigan (New York Times–bestselling author Jennifer Haigh). It’s 1959 in Flint, Michigan, and sixteen-year-old Alex Housman has just stolen his fourteenth car. Frankly, he doesn’t know why he does it. Meanwhile, his divorced father grinds out his night shift at the Chevy plant in nearby Detroit, looking forward to the flask of booze in his glove compartment. Father and son attempt to express their love for each other, even as Alex fills his days juggling cheap thrills and crushing depression. Compelled by reasons he can’t put into words, he cruises and steals, running from—and then forcing run-ins with—the police. Broke and fighting to survive, Alex and his father face the realities of estrangement and incarceration as their lives unfold toward a climactic episode that the New York Times considers “one of the most profoundly powerful in American fiction.” “A remarkable, gripping first novel.” —Joyce Carol Oates, New York Times–bestselling author of A Book of American Martyrs “Poignant and beautifully written . . . so true and so excruciatingly painful that one can’t read it without feeling the knife’s cruel blade in the heart.” —The Boston Globe