WE'RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER by Owen King - SIGNED 1ST EDITION UK TRADE PAPER BOOK
See all titles by Owen King.
Inventive, entertaining, and crafted with the touch of a classic storyteller, We're All in This Together marks the fiction debut of a young writer of impressive maturity and range. In his wry and addictively readable novella, Owen King conjures an eccentric Northeastern family whose personal strife mirrors the political turmoil of our time. George is the teenage son of a single mother, and the only grandson of a family of union organizers in Maine. George's grandfather Henry, obsessed with the outcome of the 2000 election, has planted a giant billboard of homage to Al Gore in his front yard that he suspects has been defaced by the paperboy, now a sworn enemy. Meanwhile, George's mother is about to marry Dr. Vic, who, besides being possessed of an almost royal obliviousness, may even have voted for George W. Bush. George's efforts to aid his endearingly cranky grandfather and to undermine his mother's marriage reflect on a central question for our times: How will we fight? All together, or all alone?
The short stories that accompany the novella span a vast fictional landscape, encompassing the nineteenth-century wilderness, a Florida mobile home that doubles as a wedding chapel, and a raucous baseball stadium in 1930s Coney Island. In "Frozen Animals," an itinerant dentist finds himself snowed in with a group of trappers for a long evening of primitive surgery and laughing gas reveries, and in "My Second Wife," a jilted husband accompanies his brother on a wild ride to acquire a car from a man on death row. Whether set in the past or the present, tinged with the macabre, the solemn, the humorous, or the absurd, Owen King's instantly engaging fiction carries the weight of real emotion and revelation.
