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Taking its inspiration from Great Expectations, this novel teases us with the question of what Pip might have been like had he grown up in the American South of the 1960s and 1970s and faced the explosive social issues–racial injustice, a war abroad, womenís and gay rights, class struggle–that galvanized the world in those decades. A guilty encounter with an escaped felon, a summer spent working for an eccentric man with a mysterious past, conflicted erotic feelings for his employerís niece and nephew–these events set the stage for a journey of sexual and moral discovery that takes Newt Seward to New England, Rome, and Paris–all before returning home to confront his lifeís many expectations and disappointments. Deftly combining elements of coming-of-age story, novel of erotic discovery, Southern Gothic fiction, and detection-mystery thriller, FURNACE CREEK leaps the frame of Dickensí masterpiece to provide a contemporary meditation on the perils of desire, ambition, love, loss, and family.
Joseph Boone has written a page-turning novel, a spirited American retelling of an English classic. The American South is our own Dickensian England, and Boone brings both worlds vividly alive with his ebullient prose. A joyously ambitious debut! – Marianne Wiggins, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award nominee for Evidence of Things Unseen, Joe Boone’s FURNACE CREEK is a funny, moving, and true rendition of everybody’s story: surviving our childhoods, which can be uniquely challenging if you’re Southern, and queer. Boone is a natural novelist, and FURNACE CREEK is a genuine accomplishment.–Michael Cunningham
Joseph Allen Boone grew up in the piedmont foothills of North Carolina and earned his BA from Duke University, where Reynolds Price numbered among his creative writing teachers. Now a professor of English at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, he is the author of three works of non-fiction, a musical adaptation of Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man, and a forthcoming short story collection from BSPG, Conditions of Precarity. Furnace Creek, his debut novel, was a finalist in four international competitions.
Elizabeth Kostova is the author of the international bestseller The Historian. She graduated from Yale and holds an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she won the Hopwood Award for the Novel-in-Progress.