Garden of Last Days, The

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One early September night in Florida, a young woman brings her daughter to work. April’s usual babysitter, Jean, has had a panic attack that has landed her in hospital. April doesn't really know anyone else, so she decides it's best to have her three-year-old daughter close by, watching children’s videos in the office, while she works. But April is a stripper at the Puma Club for Men. And tonight she has an unusual client, a foreigner both remote and too personal, and free with his money. Lots of it, all cash. His name is Bassam. Meanwhile, another man, AJ, has been thrown out of the club for holding hands with his favourite stripper, and he’s drunk and angry and lonely. From these explosive elements comes a relentless, raw, searing, passionate page-turning narrative, a big-hearted and painful novel about sex and parenthood, honour and masculinity. Set in the seamy underside of American life at the moment before the world changed, it juxtaposes lust for domination with hunger for connection, sexual violence with family love. It seizes the reader by the throat with the same psychological tension, depth and realism that characterised Andre Dubus’s bestselling House of Sand and Fog – and with an even greater sense of the dark and anguished places in the human heart.

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Andre Dubus III is the author of House of Sand and Fog, Bluesman and The Cage Keeper and Other Stories. He lives with his family north of Boston.