| Description |
682 pages ; 23 cm |
| Summary |
"The story opens on VE Day, May 8, 1945, when twenty-year old Vera, hoping to celebrate the end of World War II with her mother and grandmother, is brutally raped by an unknown assailant. From that rape is born a boy named Fred, a misfit who later becomes a boxer. Vera's younger son, Barnum, forms a special but bizarre relationship with this half brother, fraught with rivalry and dependence as well as love. "I should have been your father," Fred tells Barnum, "instead of the fool who says he is."" |
|
"It is Barnum, now a screenwriter with a fondness for lies and alcohol, who narrates his family's saga. From the love of his great-grandmother, a star of the silent movies, for an Arctic explorer lost on an expedition in the far North, to Fred's violent conception and the eventual birth of Barnum's own son, he chronicles generations of independent women and absent and flawed men, whom he calls the Night Men. Among them is his father, Arnold, who bequeaths to Barnum his circus name, his excessively small stature, and a con man's belief in the power of illusion." "A tale of brothers alike and opposite as halves, The Half Brother is also a funny and endearing remembrance of childhood, of growing up among eccentrics and misfits, and of a circle of friends who, upon finding each other, find a way into the world of adulthood."--BOOK JACKET |
| Notes |
Originally published: Oslo : J.W. Cappelen, c2001 |
| Genre/Form |
Fiction.
|
| Author |
Steven, Kenneth.
|
| LC no. |
2003019905 |
| ISBN |
1559707151 |
|
