Bluesman

by Andre Dubus (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2001

  $3.30

  It is 1967. There's a war going on in Vietnam. In rural Heywood, Massachusetts, white men are playing the blues and eighteen-year-old Leo Suther is writing clumsy love songs to his girlfriend Allie Donovan. Leo has no intention if going off to war. He has big plans for his life with Allie. Though it's summer vacation now, there is no shortage of teachers for Leo. His father warns him that life can turn on a dime . His jamming partners introduce him to the beauty of the blues harp. Allie's father, the local communist and civil rights organiser, lectures him on politics. And, of course, Allie herself has much to teach him. However, when Leo's life threatens to come unglued, it is his mother's wisdom he turns to. Though she died before Leo was five, her voice lives on in her diaries and poems, testifying to the strength of her love for her husband and son - a love that can still, years later, offer consolation. In Bluesman Andre Dubus III has written a novel of great warmth that evokes a time when America itself was coming of age, a novel that shows the same powerful understanding of humanity and the ways that human beings can misunderstand each other as his extraordinary novel House of Sand and Fog.

• Used

  Paperback
  2002

  $3.30

  It is the summer of 1967, and Leo Suther with one more year of high school to go, still has a lot to learn. He soon finds himself in the middle of a consuming love affair with Allie Donovan - whilst being tested on his. political values by her father, who challenges him on the escalating Vietnam conflict and forces him to examine just where he stands in relation to the people in his life. Throughout his - and the nation's - unforgettable 'summer of love,' Leo is learning the language of the blues, which seem to echo the mourning he feels for his dead mother, his occasionally distant father, and the youth that is fast giving way to manhood.