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'A profound meditation on class, privilege and masculinity' Observer
'An insightful, nuanced story ... I couldn't put it down' Charles Yu
'Timely and timeless ... A book about the lies we knowingly or unwittingly tell ourselves' New York Times
I know my son. I know what he is and what he's not capable of.
Revelling in the triumph of a high school football win, MJ, Vikram and Diego find themselves at an ill-fated party, on a night that ends with the school bully in hospital. When no one comes forward with the truth of what actually happened, all three teenage “all stars” are suspended for the rest of the season, their futures suddenly uncertain.
In the aftermath, the families gather to assess the damage to their children's prospects, their reputations and their own relationships. As other secrets begin to bubble to the surface, each parent attempts to navigate the crisis at hand, confronted with their own inner turmoil and the question none of them want to face: how well can you ever truly know your own child?Our Beautiful Boys is a page-turning and incisive novel about masculinity, race, education and privilege, and the conflict that arises when all these collide.
Quote: Our Beautiful Boys by Sameer Pandya, Bloomsbury,
With a nod to E.M. Forster's A Passage to India, the drama in Sameer Pandya's Our Beautiful Boys proceeds from shadows in a cave. At an elite school in southern California, three highschool football stars with bright futures ahead of them face disaster after a night of violence. A confrontation in an ancient cave between MJ, Vikram and Diego and the bully and drug dealer Stanley Kincaid ends with Kincaid so badly beaten he's taken to hospital. The three boys are suspended, and we're swept into the world of the boys and their families, as the school and authorities investigate. Pandya's novel reminded me a little of Christos Tsiolkas' The Slap, in that the repercussions of a violent act bleed onto a social battleground. As we learn more about the Latino, Indian- American and privileged white families the boys grew up in, the novel becomes an elegant springboard for an examination - as meticulous as it is cleareyed - of the psychology and politics of race, wealth and masculinity in contemporary American education.
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