Leopold Bloom King, our narrator, is the son of an amiable, loving father who teaches science at the local high school. His mother, an ex-nun, is the high school principal and a well-known Joyce scholar. After Leo's older brother commits suicide at the age of thirteen, the family struggles with the shattering effects of his death. Eventually he becomes part of a tightly knit group of high school seniors that includes friends Sheba and Trevor Poe, glamorous twins with an alcoholic mother and a prison-escapee father; hardscrabble mountain runaways Niles and Starla Whitehead; socialite Molly Huger and her boyfriend, Chadworth Rutledge X; and an ever-widening circle whose liaisons will ripple across two decades-from 1960s counterculture through the dawn of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.
After his brother's suicide, Leo struggles to overcome the grief and isolation that threatens to destroy him and embarks on a search for fulfillment over two decades. The plot contains profanity, sexual situations, and violence.
- ISBN10 1848878850
- ISBN13 9781848878853
- Publish Date 1 July 2010 (first published 1 January 2009)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 28 February 2014
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Atlantic Books
- Imprint Corvus
- Edition Waterstones Edition
- Format Paperback
- Pages 528
- Language English