We're All In This Together

Description

In his wry novella, Owen King conjures an eccentric North-Eastern American family whose personal strife mirrors the political turmoil of our time. George is the teenaged son of a single mother, and the only grandson of a family of union organisers 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 by 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?

Owen King was born in Bangor, Maine, which in the nineteenth century was arguably the lumber capital of the world, but which today is better known as the home of the easternmost major airport in the United States, the place where trans-Atlantic flights most often make emergency landings to kick off drunken and/or unruly passengers. Bangor is also cold most of the year, light for a only a few hours a day in the winter, and abutted to the north by an almost solid wall of pine trees stretching all the way to Canada. That said, Bangor - and the rest of Maine - went for Gore in 2000, and Kerry in 2004. This is an example, says Owen King, of the Yankee sensibility that defines and informs his work: stoically contrary, depressed, and deeply, deeply weird. A graduate of Bangor Public High School, King went on to attend Vassar College in upstate New York, where he received a B.A. in English, and then to Columbia University, where he received an M.F.A. in fiction writing. His fiction and non-fiction has appeared in publications such as the Bellingham Review, Book Magazine, the Boston Globe, and Topic Magazine. He has been nominated for a National Magazine Award and is a recipient of the John Gardner Memorial Prize for Fiction. King is also a screenwriter, with a script currently under option with Working Title Productions. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his partner, the novelist Kelly Braffet (Fabulous Things), and some cats. We're All in This Together is his first published book.

"'Stupendous.' Independent"