Warren Spooner is born in rural Georgia, on the first Sunday of December 1956, after a prolonged and unhappy labour in a makeshift delivery room. His troubled birth is swiftly followed by his father's untimely death - and young Spooner is left to get on with growing up, without even a memory of his daddy's face. Spooner's childhood is fraught with calamity. He makes it into minor league baseball, but an injury to his throwing arm relegates him to the sidelines, and dashes his hopes of making it to the big-time. But Spooner is nothing if not resilient, standing up to tragedy and adversity in his own dark (often extremely dark) ways. Through it all his step-father - Calmer Ottoson - stands by, determinedly trying to save his step-son, yet utterly powerless to do so. From troubled childhood, to troubled adolescence and violent and troubled adulthood Dexter tells an entirely gripping story of one man's inexhaustible patience tested to the limits as he struggles to rescue a step-son he will never understand .

Author Biography

Pete Dexter is one of America's great living novelists. He won the US National Book Award for Fiction for Paris Trout, two Penn West Awards for Best Novel of the Year (Paris Trout and The Paperboy), and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Novel for his last novel, Train.