Townie

In this raw and splendid memoir, the author of the acclaimed novel HOUSE OF SOUND AND FOG explores his relationship with his father, Andre Dubus II, a well-known writer who left the family when Dubus III was a boy. The author and his three siblings were left to a life of poverty and drugs in a run-down mill town in Massachusetts. Dubus copes with the onslaught of violence against him and his family by building up his muscles and his courage, and soon develops a taste for blood. Dubus's even voice wonderfully conveys the teenager's formidable fighting experiences as well as the uncanny flashes of insight that led him to relinquish the urge to fight and to focus on his own writing. F.J.K. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

March 28, 2011
Dubus, author of House of Sand and Fog, opens his memoir when he's 16, chasing his father through a forest. Having never run more than two miles in his life, Dubus runs 10 that day, in his sister's shoes, two sizes too small, which leave his 10 toes "split open like sausages over a fire." It's a dramatic, moving moment that sets the stage for a story of the author's impoverished, brutal childhood. In a neighborhood where "kids roamed the neighborhood like dogs," Dubus is faced with either giving in or getting out. His reading is fluid and convincing, adding an intimacy to the account, making the listening especially cathartic. A Norton hardcover.