Excommunicados

By turns haunting, hilarious, and heart breaking, Charles Havertys debut collection charts the journeys of men, women, and children cast out of familiar territory into emotional terra incognita where people and things are rarely what they seem. These twelve stories are populated with exnuns and Freedom Riders, Chaucer scholars and strippers, outofwork comedy writers and presidents, navigating their way through bedrooms and emergency rooms, backyard burial parties and airplane crash sites, the Piazza San Marco and the postapocalyptic suburbs of Boston.

A sixteenyearold boy unearths grisly evidence of his genteel grandfathers racist past. At his sisters boozesoaked destination wedding, a recovering alcoholic English professor is finagled into ghostwriting their unreliable fathers nuptial toast. A small town lawyers Edenic existence is jeopardized when his wifes younger brother is arrested for a rash of local burglaries. In the wake of her daughters brush with disaster in the Haiti earthquake, a mother finds herself drawn down a dark neighbourhood sidewalk toward what might or might not be a dead body. And in the title storythe first of three linked storiesa pious altar boy confronts the twin mysteries of sex and death through the auspices of a classmates divorced mother. There are secrets at the center of each of these daring and original storiessecrets that separate these characters from one another but grow in the mind and the heart, connecting them with all of us. See more