American Youth, Phil Lamarche, The Paperback Bookshop, Melbourne, Australia

A young teenager is confronted by a terrible moral dilemma following a firearms accident at his home. Coerced by his mother to lie about his role in the incident, he has nonetheless earned the admiration of a sinister group of boys at his school who subscribe to a twisted notion of traditional, puritanical values. As he is drawn into this group he struggles to hold on to a sense of right and wrong. An acclaimed debut novel that portrays a boy's rites of passage in an America ill at ease with itself. A young teenager is confronted by a terrible moral dilemma following a firearms accident at his home. Coerced by his mother to lie about his role in the incident, he has nonetheless earned the admiration of a sinister group of boys at his school who subscribe to a twisted notion of traditional, puritanical values. As he is drawn into this group he struggles to hold on to a sense of right and wrong. An acclaimed debut novel that portrays a boy's rites of passage in an America ill at ease with itself.