The Garden of Last Days

One early September night at the moment before the world changes a young woman brings her daughter to work. April's usual babysitter Jean has had a panic attack that's landed her in hospital. April doesn't really know anyone else so 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 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.