Somewhere South Of Here
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
With his widely acclaimed debut, 28-year-old William Kowalski emerged as one of the most exciting and distinctive new American writers in years. In his hew book, Kowalski once again proves himself an extraordinarily gifted writer as he follows his hero Billy Mann on his search for the mother who deserted him as a baby. Now 20 years old, Billy travels atop his beloved motorcycle to the last known address he has for her ot a side street named Santa Fe, New Mexico. It is a journey that will teach him many things about family, friends, love - and death.
Filled with wondrous imagery and lyricism, Somewhere South of Here has a lightness of touch that belies how very much it has to say about life's greatest themes of all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kowalski made a good impression with his sentimental first novel, Eddie's Bastard, and continues the story here as he takes hero Billy Mann out to Santa Fe on his motorbike to see if he can trace the mother who gave him away as a baby to be raised by his grandfather. There is no one left in Billy's life except Mildred, his grandfather's elderly companion, who acts like a widow in the wake of his death, and so Billy, now an aspiring writer, feels stifled in his upstate New York hometown. Once in Santa Fe, he meets a sinister Latino neighbor who tells him the girl working at the local cantina may be his sister; through her, Billy finds his mother, dying slowly of cancer in a hospital miles away. He nurses her faithfully in her closing days without ever telling her who he is, starts an affair with Consuelo, a Mexican-born former trapeze artist who is now a singer, quarrels with her, then goes back home and helps Mildred fight off efforts to close down a shelter for unwed mothers she has started in the family's old house. In the end, who should come back, repentant and pregnant, but Consuelo ("`I love you, Beelee.' `I love you, too,' I said. `I know that,' she said.") If all this sounds a little artless, it is. Kowalski has a relaxed, easygoing style, and one or two touching moments shine, but Billy is so utterly without affect, and the other characters are sketched so loosely, that the narrative feels severely underpopulated. This book suffers from a bad case of second-novel syndrome.