Boy’s Life takes place in the lost world of Zephyr, Alabama in 1964. Its narrator/hero. Cory Mackenson, is an eleven-year-old boy about to encounter the mysteries lying beneath the surface of everyday life. At the heart of those mysteries is a brutal, inexplicable murder. An unidentified man--strangled, beaten, and handcuffed to the wheel of his car--plunges into Saxon Lake, as Cory and his horrified father look on. The murder will come to haunt them both in unimaginable ways.

Set against that violent act is a marvelously rendered account of a community, a family, and a way of life. Boy’s Life is at once a closely observed portrait of day-to-day life in Zephyr--a town with more than its share of eccentric personalities--and a meditation on the power and persistence of magic. It is a book in which the quotidian realities--school, family, economic hardships--co-exist with an assortment of impossible but equally real elements: a ghost car driven by a ghostly driver, a monster that lives in the local river, a dog that returns, strangely altered, from the dead…

Beautifully written and astonishingly moving, Boy’s Life is itself a piece of working magic that celebrates the magic in ordinary things, such as love, work, friendship, and play.