A Garden Of Sand

A Garden Of Sand

$20.00 AUD

Availability: in stock at our Tullamarine warehouse

Condition: SECONDHAND

This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.


Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket - some marks on spine and corners
Pages: Tanning and foxing
Markings: Fair - Rubbed edges and bumping on spine and corners

Set against the sun-scorched plains of Depression-era America, A Garden of Sand is a raw, unflinching portrait of poverty, survival, and the corrosive toll of hardship on the human spirit. Earl Thompson chronicles the early life of Jack Andersen, a young boy navigating a world of itinerant desperation, sexual awakening, and moral ambiguity alongside his deeply flawed yet compellingly rendered mother — a woman whose own hungers and failures shape his understanding of love, loyalty, and loss. Thompson writes with a brutal honesty that places him firmly in the tradition of American naturalist fiction, drawing inevitable comparisons to James T. Farrell and Henry Miller in his refusal to sanitize working-class reality. His prose is muscular and unrelenting, steeped in the grime and tenderness of lives lived on the margins, and the novel stands as a significant, if often overlooked, testament to the darker undercurrents of the American Dream. For readers willing to confront literature at its most visceral, this semi-autobiographical debut asks a haunting question: what does it cost a child to grow up in a world that was never built for him?

Author: Earl Thompson
Format: Hardback

Genre: Modern fiction

Description


Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket - some marks on spine and corners
Pages: Tanning and foxing
Markings: Fair - Rubbed edges and bumping on spine and corners

Set against the sun-scorched plains of Depression-era America, A Garden of Sand is a raw, unflinching portrait of poverty, survival, and the corrosive toll of hardship on the human spirit. Earl Thompson chronicles the early life of Jack Andersen, a young boy navigating a world of itinerant desperation, sexual awakening, and moral ambiguity alongside his deeply flawed yet compellingly rendered mother — a woman whose own hungers and failures shape his understanding of love, loyalty, and loss. Thompson writes with a brutal honesty that places him firmly in the tradition of American naturalist fiction, drawing inevitable comparisons to James T. Farrell and Henry Miller in his refusal to sanitize working-class reality. His prose is muscular and unrelenting, steeped in the grime and tenderness of lives lived on the margins, and the novel stands as a significant, if often overlooked, testament to the darker undercurrents of the American Dream. For readers willing to confront literature at its most visceral, this semi-autobiographical debut asks a haunting question: what does it cost a child to grow up in a world that was never built for him?