What We Lost

From the jacket:

In the haunting new book by the acclaimed author of Now It’s Time to Say Goodbye, a young man must choose between his troubled family and the new home he loves.

Dale Peck, Sr. grew up poor on rural Long Island in the 1950s, sharing a one-room house with seven brothers and sisters, an abusive mother, and an alcoholic father haunted by his past. When, at fourteen, Dale is more or less kidnapped by his father and taken to his uncle’s farm in upstate New York, the change wrought by the move is remarkable. Thriving on the farm, Dale develops a loving relationship with his Uncle Wallace, and for the first time he knows contentment. But when Dale’s mother demands the he return, he is forced to choose between his broken family and the land and uncle he has come to love. It is a decision that will determine his future and the legacy he will pass on to his own son.

What We Lost is a coming-of-age story that startles in its immediacy and lack of sentimentality. Refracting his father’s past through the prism of his own vivid imagination, the author Dale Peck forges a bridge between generations and reveals the dark secrets at the heart of family.

“Every reader knows that time when you simply must close a book in gratitude and breathe in some of the silence it has created. What We Lost is that sort of book over and over again. This is a meditation on the permanence of glancing moments; an examination of how we tell our stories; a portrait of love and failure; and a hard, fascinating look at the consequences of the bits and pieces of our lives. With ease Peck stretches the boundaries of memoir into the realm of the imagination, and in the end contends that it doesn’t matter how we tell our stories—what matters is that we have them to tell. This is a book of grace and dignity that will be around for a long, long time”

— Colum McCann