Can anyone truly outrun their past?
After his father dies suddenly and his family’s fortune takes a nosedive, 15-year old Jonas Shore starts selling drugs to cool kids at his Philadelphia high school. When his hustle catches up with him, he’s sent off to a boarding school for fatherless boys.
At Lafayette Academy, Jonas and his roommates form a tight unit, vowing to have each others’ backs for life, but their bond is tested after a brush with death threatens to rob them of their futures.
Two decades later, Jonas is balancing a family and several successful businesses when one of his old pals shows up with ghosts from the past, threatening to destroy everything he’s built.
Praise for Don Silver’s “Scorched”...
“Silver masterfully develops a dynamic cast featuring a complex lead”
“consistently engrossing…[Scorched] demons
“thought-provoking…wonderfully written”
–Readers’ Favorite
Backward-Facing Man
Chuck Puckman, Lorraine Nadia, and Frederick Keane came of age in the late 1960s. Like that era, their lives were mysterious, idealistic, passionate, even romantic—but ultimately confused and often ineffectual. More than thirty years later, their youthful adventures continue to have ramifications: Chuck faces prosecution after an industrial accident at his family business, Lorraine’s daughter is searching for the father she never knew, and Frederick has gone underground after his radical life spiraled out of control.
Epic in scope and touching on such provocative issues as Patty Hearst and the SLA, crime and the possibility of redemption, and the search for self and the meaning of life, Backward-Facing Man is a novel about choices and their lasting effects on people’s lives, their families, and American society.
Book Reviews
Praise for Don Silver’s “Backward-Facing Man”…
“Silver’s unusual perspective and wide range of material are enough to make this a memorably offbeat debut. So is the palpable struggle that he captures on the page.”
–The New York Times
“A dark elegy for ’60s campus radicalism and its turn toward violence in the years that followed, Silver’s debut novel is a complex, beautifully turned-out thriller… The plot has real bite”
–Publishers Weekly
“Gritty and intense… has that caught-breath momentum that keeps the reader in for another page, another page, another page, right to the finish.”
–Sven Birkerts, author of “The Other Walk” and “The Gutenberg Elegies”
“an illuminating and entertaining book about the notion of idealism”
–Pittsburgh Tribune
About Don Silver
Don Silver has been a musician, talent scout for a record company, record producer, business person, and consultant to CEOs. He has an MFA from Bennington College. His first novel, Backward-Facing Man, published by Ecco/HarperCollins, was hailed as “memorably offbeat” (The New York Times) and “illuminating and entertaining” (Pittsburgh Tribune). Scorched is his second novel. Originally from Philadelphia, Don lives in Asheville, NC.