‘Dark, funny, raw and elegant, L.I.E. is the striking debut of a singular voice’

Long Island, New York, 1988: Harlan Kessler – raised in Medford, in the heart of blue-collar Suffolk Country, through which runs the Long Island Expressway (the L.I.E.), connecting the outlying suburbs with the hipper neighbourhoods of Nassau County and New York City – graduates from high school. He plays in a band, he parties; he struggles diligently to lose his virginity. He doesn’t think about the future much, except as an escape from the present. He sometimes thinks that none of this, his life, is really happening, that he might be a character in someone else’s story, a fleeting thought in the mind of God.

L.I.E. follows Harlan, his family and his friends through two years of love, sex, death, betrayal, salvation and enlightenment. In ten intimately interwoven stories, in prose that swings fluidly from gritty realism to heightened metafiction, David Hollander maps an American landscape that is at once vividly familiar and highly exotic, creating an unforgettable portrait of the passage to adulthood and the search for identity, certain to resonate with legions of readers.

Price: £8.99
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0-7145-3070-0
Fiction
Publication date: July 2002