Brock Clarke Livres

Sam Pulsifer, the hapless hero of this incendiary novel, has come to the end of a very long and unusual journey. The truth is, a lot of remarkable things have happened in Sam's life. He spent ten years in prison for accidentally burning down poet Emily Dickinson's house - and unwittingly killing two people in the process. He emerged aged twenty-eight and set about creating a new life for himself. He went to college, found love, got married, fathered two children, and made a new start - and then watched in almost-silent awe as the vengeful past caught up with him, right at his own front door. As, one by one, the homes of other famous New England writers are torched, Sam knows that this time he is most certainly not guilty. To prove his innocence, he sets out to uncover the identity of this literary-minded arsonist

A nine-year-old boy named Miller, who lives in Watertown, NY, struggles to make sense of his father's disappearance, for which he blames himself. Later, when he is convinced that his father is lying in a coma in the local VA hospital, he searches for the one person he thinks can save his father, the famously reclusive--and dead--author, Frederick Exley, Watertown native and author of the "fictional memoir" A Fan's Notes, his father's favorite book. Told in alternating voices of the young boy and the therapist the boy's mother has hired to help him, Exley is ultimately an exploration of the difference between what we believe to be real and what is real and how difficult it is to reconcile the two.