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A Novel
Random House
February 2008
On Sale: January 22, 2008
432 pages
ISBN: 1400066506
EAN: 9781400066506
Hardcover
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Fiction
One Saturday night in Las Vegas, twelve-year-old Newell
Ewing goes out with a friend and doesn’t come home. In the
aftermath of his disappearance, his mother, Lorraine, makes
daily pilgrimages to her son’s room and tortures herself
with memories. Equally distraught, the boy’s 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 what’s become of their
son, the circumstances surrounding Newell’s 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 “urban nomads,” 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 redemption–heralding the arrival of
a major new writer.
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