High Risk Books
2 total works
Adam Klein?s debut fiction, The Medicine Burns, is a collection of stories linked by a central voice that is at once precise, touching and brutal. In ?Club Feet? a mother and son are inexorably bound by this inherited physical deformity; in the title story ?The Medicine Burns? a gay adolescent tyrannized by acne turns vengeful after failing in his struggle to be loved; in ?India? a young man with AIDS, unable to connect with everyday life, takes an exotic adventure. These stories brim with boys and men who do not fit in, shedding new light on the outsider in our society.
Carrie hasn?t always made the best decisions in her life. But her affair with Victor, one of her clients when she worked as a caseworker in San Francisco, had disastrous results. Years later, handling cases in the midst of the frozen winters of the Mid-West, Carrie is assigned Hannah as a client. Carrie recognises in her a kindred spirit also trying to escape a troubled past. Both Carrie and Hannah know what it is to be surrounded by violence. They know the mental scars can last longer than any physical mark. As they try to work through their respective traumas, Carrie becomes increasingly aware that her past has, literally, come back to haunt her. Could that shadowy figure she?s seen be Victor, returning to claim her, and drag her back to her old life of addiction and crime? Or has he come back for revenge? Tiny Ladies is a stark and suspenseful novel about remorse, the ironies of intervention and the terrible courage it sometimes takes to start again.