The War for Gloria: A Novel

By: Atticus Lish

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Synopsis: From the author of the PEN/Faulkner winning debut novel Preparation for the Next Life--a searing, tender, haunting story about fathers and sons, sons and mothers, and a young boy's struggle to become a man.Corey Goltz is fifteen years old when his mother, Gloria, is diagnosed with ALS. Estranged from his father, and increasingly responsible for meeting both his mother's needs and his own, Corey is determined to be the hero Gloria needs--at any cost. But when his father Leonard re-enters the picture, Corey's beliefs--about honour and love, duty and devotion, and the uses and misuses of power--are sorely tested. Charismatic and cruel, Leonard is a man of outsize influence and dubious moral character, a man whose neglect of his wife and son amounts to a kind of barbarism. The closer Corey gets to understanding his father's role in their family, the closer he comes to unmasking a violence that is beyond even his worst imaginings.Set against the backdrop of a small town in Massachusetts in the early 2000s, where the working-class world collides with the professional and academic worlds of nearby Boston and Cambridge, The War for Gloria tells the story of a young man straddling childhood and adulthood, whose yearning to protect his mother requires him to dismantle the myth of--and possibly destroy--his father. A gripping, indelible work from a fearless new voice in American fiction.