For ten years, a secret has slept with Oliver Loving.
One moonless November night, Oliver shyly joined his classmates at Bliss County Day School's annual dance, hoping for a glimpse of the object of his unrequited affections, an enigmatic Junior named Rebekkah Sterling. But as the music played in the gymnasium, a troubled young man snuck in through the school's back door. It was all over in a few terrible minutes; the dire decisions this man made that night, and the unspoken story he carried, forever transformed Oliver's world and tore the town of Bliss, Texas apart.
Nearly ten years later, Oliver Loving still lies wordless and paralyzed at Crockett State Assisted Care Facility, the fate of his mind unclear. Meanwhile, his parents and his brother try to cope in their own disparate self-destructive ways, whilst Rebekkah, who left Texas long ago, still refuses to speak about her own part in that tragic night.
When a new medical test promises a key to unlock Oliver's trapped mind, the town's unanswered questions resurface with new urgency, as Oliver's doctors and his family fight for a way for Oliver to finally communicate? and so also to tell the truth of what really happened that fateful night.
Oliver Loving is a brilliant and beautifully told story of family, as heart-breaking as it is profound. It is a novel of the myths we make; the ties that bind us and the forces that keep us apart.
"The book poses big questions about what constitutes a life worth living." - Publishers Weekly
From Stefan Merrill Block, celebrated literary talent and author of The Story of Forgetting, comes a brilliant, propulsive book about family, the traumas and secrets that test our deepest bonds, and the stories that hold us together.
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Book Description hardback. Condition: New. Language: ENG. Seller Inventory # 9781786492081
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. Seller Inventory # 9781786492081
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Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. Hardcover. At once an affectionate, lyrical meditation on the transformative power of grief and a darkly comic Texan phantasmagoria of mangled lives and poisoned legacies, Oliver Loving ventures into the unthinkable and returns bearing no less than the truth of what ties a family together beyond love.One summer night, beneath the Perseid meteor shower, seventeen-year-old Oliver Loving's hand makes a first furtive journey across a Navajo picnic blanket towards his classmate Rebekkah Sterling's. A few months later, Hector Espina enters Bliss County Day School's gymnasium during homecoming and shoulders a hunting rifle. The thirty-five rounds he fires cut a leveling swathe through the past and future of Oliver, his family, and the entire population of Bliss, Texas.For the next nine years, Oliver is confined to a hospital bed. Conscious but totally paralyzed, he plumbs the depths of his own imagination, a twilit netherworld of myth, in search of meaning. Eve, his adoring and indomitable mother, holds a solemn, lonesome vigil. Vulnerable younger brother Charlie flees to New York where he desperately attempts to resurrect Oliver's consciousness using nothing but three weather-beaten journals full of unfinished poetry. Jed, Oliver's father, seems content to drink himself to death in a burnt out shack in the shadow of a resort hotel built on the land that is his birthright. But with the arrival of Professor McTeague from El Paso, towing along a new trailer-bound MRI machine and a revelation that Oliver's brain death may not be as complete as previously thought, a reckoning comes to Bliss and to the Loving family. Longtime grieving parent and newly minted experimental speech therapist Margot Strout descends, determined to make sure that Oliver reveals the truth about what happened that November night in this life or the next. What she finds, or claims to find, may prove the Lovings' salvation or push them forever into the outer darkness. 'Every page of thiscompelling,exquisitely writtennovelis suffused with a warm intelligence that evokes the best of Tobias Wolfe, Jeffrey Eugenides and Michael Chabon.With a superbevocation of place (Texas),Oliver Lovingis a haunting,imaginative, and deeply poignant storyby one of America's great wordsmiths.I love this wise, probing and beautiful novel.' - Steve Toltz Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9781786492081
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Book Description Hardback. Condition: New. New copy - Usually dispatched within 4 working days. A school shooting in a Texan border town leaves a family in crisis, a community torn apart, and the boy who holds the secret cocooned in a coma for ten years. Seller Inventory # B9781786492081
Book Description Condition: Brand New. 400 pages. 9.45x6.69x1.57 inches. In Stock. Seller Inventory # __1786492083
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: New. Seller Inventory # 6666-TBS-9781786492081
Book Description Condition: New. . Main. Hardcover. . . . . . Books ship from the US and Ireland. Seller Inventory # V9781786492081