Father and Son : Winner of the Southern Book Award

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Summary: Conflict, Death and Violence -- Larry Brown never escapes
Review: Despair and guilt lay the groundwork for Larry Brown's newest novel, *Father and Son* as the South's latest voice creates the cruelest character to date, Glen Davis. This man brings you to a standstill. Within two days of release from state prison Glen has raped, killed, rejected his son and father and smashed every bone in a monkey's body. The heart punding fury of this book covers only five days, "five days you will never forget." Brown sets no restrictions on his writing or his characters. He is willing to imagine the worst and then makes you live it. Only psychological complexity squeezes out the painful glimpses of hope so desperatly desired while reading. As Larry Brown stated in an interview, "For some of them there's not going to be an easier way out - some of them are going to have to pay the price, the human price...[because]they just have to become like real folks." Nothing in *Father and Son* is disguised or sugar coated. It takes guts to read a novel such as this and own up to a reality you hope to never live.

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Summary: Riveting, Exhausting
Review: In Father and Son: A Novel, the star is the villain, the antihero. Instead of hating him for all his dastardly, savage deeds, it's easy to care for him. He is, in a sense, a wayward vehicle, a device gone bad by way of circumstance, killing or crippling anything in its way. Larry Brown weaves a tale of tragedy that leaves the reader exhausted, reflective. After all, how many of us, if we suffered and survived the same boyhood as this criminal, would have emerged with any greater sanity

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Summary: Real Bad Guys, Real Good Guys
Review: Larry Brown is the best fiction writer in America. In hisnewest novel, "Father and Son" the author brings out withan amazing accuracy for patient detail characters who show us the true split between evil and good. If you love the south, brave men who would never make it in Hollywood, and pondering in your mind what will come next, don't miss this book. You will never find an ex-firefighter who can write like this again (nor possibly anyone else).