Book description
One early September night, at the moment before the world changes,
a young woman brings her daughter to work.
April's usual babysitter, Jean, has had a panic attack that's landed
her in hospital. April doesn't really know anyone else, so decides
it's best to have her three-year-old daughter close by, watching
children's videos in the office, while she works.
But April is a stripper at the Puma Club for Men. And tonight she
has an unusual client, a foreigner both remote and too personal, and
free with his cash. His name is Bassam. Meanwhile, another man, AJ,
has been thrown out of the club for holding hands with his favourite
stripper, and he's drunk and angry and lonely.
From these explosive elements comes a relentless, raw, searing,
passionate page-turning narrative, a big-hearted and painful novel
about sex and parenthood, honour and masculinity. Set in the seamy
underside of American life at the moment before the world changed, it
juxtaposes lust for domination with hunger for connection, sexual
violence with family love. It seizes the reader by the throat with the
same psychological tension, depth and realism that characterised Andre
Dubus's bestselling House of Sand and Fog - and with an even
greater sense of the dark and anguished places in the human heart.
Andre Dubus III is the author of
House of Sand and Fog
,
Bluesman
and
The Cage Keeper and Other Stories
. He lives with his family north of Boston.
