Corey Goltz grows up in working-class Boston as the only child of Gloria, whose intellectual ambitions were derailed early. Corey, restless, dreams of a great adventure.

Instead, when he is fifteen, Gloria is diagnosed with ALS and, too late, his estranged father, Leonard - a man of great charisma and deep resentments - reenters the picture. Determined to be his mother’s hero at any cost, Corey begins shouldering responsibility for her expensive medical care, pushing himself to his physical and emotional limits as her disease progresses. And as Leonard’s influence over Corey grows, Corey must dismantle the myth of his father’s genius and confront the evil that lurks beneath it.

This is a heartbreaking, shocking and beautiful novel. It confirms Lish as one of the greatest storytellers and prose stylists in the English language.