ONLY SON
This is a preorder. Only Son will be released this November, with copies mailing prior to release.
Florida, 1982. A nine-year-old watches as his dead father’s possessions are hauled away: his clothes and tools, his faux-leather recliner. His sensei says it’s a perfect time to turn his weaknesses into weapons. His PE teacher says he runs like a pregnant ostrich. His mother takes out a personals ad. Everyone is trying to teach him a lesson but he is, it seems, a slow learner. Meanwhile, with each passing day, his father recedes, growing less and less plausible, almost a myth.
Twenty-five years later, adrift in suburban Southern California, married with a son of his own, he’s still trying to sort through the fragments of his father’s death while imparting his own sketchy education onto his son. Which snakes are poisonous? Why did I tell him that Candyland is based on a true story? Why has he stopped asking me to go skateboarding with him and his friends? After discovering a travel journal he didn’t know his father kept, he and his son light out on a road trip, retracing the father’s mystifying journey. As he strains to decipher his father’s notes, his relationship with his son begins to take on new heft and shape.
With wit and compassion, award-winning author Kevin Moffett’s debut novel delivers a bracingly intimate account of fatherhood, and discovery, and the experiences of two men far from home.
Praise for Only Son
“Only Son is a great glorious siren song of desperation and double helixes—at once a love story and an elegy, a ballad of skate parks and snake nests, the swamp and the desert, bullies and borderlands. It’s a chronicle of imperfect attempts to the people standing right in front of us, living in our bones and marrow—and offering them the grace of seeing them differently. This book gripped me and didn’t let me go. I read it standing at a rental-car counter and looked up to find half-an-hour had passed, realized that I would walk away from that Alamo counter in Cincinnati a different woman than the one who’d arrived—reconfigured and oddly resurrected by this tale of sweat, surrender, longing, fathers, sons, ghosts, voicemails, highways, silences, laughter, and—above all—the surprises of life.”
—Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story
“To those who have ever been the bewildered child of a parent or the bewildered parent of a child, I’d like to recommend this remarkable book by Kevin Moffett. With great humor and tenderness, and without platitude or sentimentality, Moffett ingeniously melds the coming-of-age novel, the fatherhood novel, and the road novel. I dislike the thought of anyone calling this book slim or slender—there’s just so much life in it, so much mystery.”
—Chris Bachelder, author of The Throwback Special
“Kevin Moffett’s Only Son perfectly captures the long ache of fatherhood in all its baffling beauty. It’s an extraordinary book about the sometimes tender, sometimes distant, always mysterious relationship between fathers and sons, written with wit and warmth and just enough sting to make it real.”
—Nathan Hill, author of The Nix
“Only Son collapses generations, fuses time. Mesmerizing and profound, this delicate, fervent book about fatherhood, and sonhood, exerts the thrumming power of a spiritual text, one quietly evoked by daily interactions with wonder, promise, and loss.”
—Heidi Julavits, author of Directions to Myself
Florida, 1982. A nine-year-old watches as his dead father’s possessions are hauled away: his clothes and tools, his faux-leather recliner. His sensei says it’s a perfect time to turn his weaknesses into weapons. His PE teacher says he runs like a pregnant ostrich. His mother takes out a personals ad. Everyone is trying to teach him a lesson but he is, it seems, a slow learner. Meanwhile, with each passing day, his father recedes, growing less and less plausible, almost a myth.
Twenty-five years later, adrift in suburban Southern California, married with a son of his own, he’s still trying to sort through the fragments of his father’s death while imparting his own sketchy education onto his son. Which snakes are poisonous? Why did I tell him that Candyland is based on a true story? Why has he stopped asking me to go skateboarding with him and his friends? After discovering a travel journal he didn’t know his father kept, he and his son light out on a road trip, retracing the father’s mystifying journey. As he strains to decipher his father’s notes, his relationship with his son begins to take on new heft and shape.
With wit and compassion, award-winning author Kevin Moffett’s debut novel delivers a bracingly intimate account of fatherhood, and discovery, and the experiences of two men far from home.
Praise for Only Son
“Only Son is a great glorious siren song of desperation and double helixes—at once a love story and an elegy, a ballad of skate parks and snake nests, the swamp and the desert, bullies and borderlands. It’s a chronicle of imperfect attempts to the people standing right in front of us, living in our bones and marrow—and offering them the grace of seeing them differently. This book gripped me and didn’t let me go. I read it standing at a rental-car counter and looked up to find half-an-hour had passed, realized that I would walk away from that Alamo counter in Cincinnati a different woman than the one who’d arrived—reconfigured and oddly resurrected by this tale of sweat, surrender, longing, fathers, sons, ghosts, voicemails, highways, silences, laughter, and—above all—the surprises of life.”
—Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story
“To those who have ever been the bewildered child of a parent or the bewildered parent of a child, I’d like to recommend this remarkable book by Kevin Moffett. With great humor and tenderness, and without platitude or sentimentality, Moffett ingeniously melds the coming-of-age novel, the fatherhood novel, and the road novel. I dislike the thought of anyone calling this book slim or slender—there’s just so much life in it, so much mystery.”
—Chris Bachelder, author of The Throwback Special
“Kevin Moffett’s Only Son perfectly captures the long ache of fatherhood in all its baffling beauty. It’s an extraordinary book about the sometimes tender, sometimes distant, always mysterious relationship between fathers and sons, written with wit and warmth and just enough sting to make it real.”
—Nathan Hill, author of The Nix
“Only Son collapses generations, fuses time. Mesmerizing and profound, this delicate, fervent book about fatherhood, and sonhood, exerts the thrumming power of a spiritual text, one quietly evoked by daily interactions with wonder, promise, and loss.”
—Heidi Julavits, author of Directions to Myself