Rent A Stone Boat

Synopsis

The debut novel, first published nearly twenty years ago, from the National Book Award-winning author of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression and Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity—a luminous and moving evocation of the love between a son and his mother.

Harry, an internationally celebrated concert pianist, arrives in Paris to confront his glamorous mother about his homosexuality. Instead, he discovers that she is terminally ill. In an attempt to escape his feelings of guilt and depression over the prospect of her death, he embarks on a series of intense love affairs—one with a longtime female friend—that force him to question his sexual identity. But as time runs out and tragedy looms closer, it is the relationship between Harry and his mother that emerges in all its stark simplicity and purity.

Part eulogy and part confession, A Stone Boat is "a shimmering remembrance of things past and a meditation on love and death...evoking with sensitivity and compassion the severing of a deeply rooted, complex relationship" (The New York Times Book Review).

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