Purchase
A Novel
Random House
February 2008
On Sale: January 22, 2008
432 pages
ISBN: 1400066506
EAN: 9781400066506
Hardcover
Add to Wish List
Fiction
One Saturday night in Las Vegas, twelve-year-old Newell Ewing goes out with a friend and doesnβt come home. In the aftermath of his disappearance, his mother, Lorraine, makes daily pilgrimages to her sonβs room and tortures herself with memories. Equally distraught, the boyβs father, Lincoln, finds himself wanting to comfort his wife even as he yearns for solace, a loving touch, any kind of intimacy. As the Ewings navigate the mystery of whatβs become of their son, the circumstances surrounding Newellβs vanishing and other events on that same night reverberate through the lives of seemingly disconnected strangers: a comic book illustrator in town for a weekend of debauchery; a painfully shy and possibly disturbed young artist; a stripper who imagines moments from her life as if they were movie scenes; a bubbly teenage wiccan anarchist; a dangerous and scheming gutter punk; a band of misfit runaways. The people of Beautiful Children are βurban nomads,β each with a past to hide and a pain to nurture, every one of them searching for salvation and barreling toward destruction, weaving their way through a neon underworld of sex, drugs, and the spinning wheels of chance. In this masterly debut novel, Charles Bock mixes incandescent prose with devious humor to capture Las Vegas with unprecedented scope and nuance and to provide a glimpse into a microcosm of modern America. Beautiful Children is an odyssey of heartache and redemptionβheralding the arrival of a major new writer.
 Media BuzzAll Things Considered - May 18, 2008
Bryant Park - February 8, 2008
All Things Considered - February 6, 2008
| 
© 2003-2026