Winner of the American Academy’s Rome Prize for fiction, The Boy Who Went Away is Eli Gottlieb’s tender, harrowing coming-of-age novel.
For Denny Graubert, the chaotic summer of 1967—when the screams of napalm bombs on the nightly news drowned the cheers of the All-Star game—brings the painful realization that childhood has passed. While engaging in his favorite domestic spying game, Denny unwittingly discovers the desperate measures his mother will take to save his autistic older brother, Fad, who is lost in the diagnostic Dark Ages of Austism. At the heart of this novel is not only the story of Denny’s coltish entrance to adolescence, but also that of his relationship with Fad, which will be forever changed during the course of that summer. The Boy Who Went Away is the cruelly antic, heartrending story of two childhoods that would, by fall’s arrival, be irretrievably lost.
Two decades after his debut novel, The Boy Who Went Away, won the Rome Prize, Eli Gottlieb returns to the subject of autism in this inspired new novel. Gottlieb lives in New York.
Chris Patton has narrated over seventy-five audiobooks. His voice can be heard narrating such titles as Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, the dystopian juggernaut Yesterday’s Gone, Clive Barker’s Books of Blood series, and two titles by Joyce Carol Oates. Chris began his career in theater at age ten, and his voice-over career at twenty-nine. Since then, he has voiced over two hundred anime titles, numerous commercials and e-learning and industrial projects, and several video games. He’s also fronted a synthpop band called Paul Lynde Is Dead, written a teen urban fantasy about an emo vampire called Scene Immortal, and has appeared as a special guest at more than eighty-five pop-culture conventions.