Book of the Month–June 2014
Perfect
By: Rachel Joyce
On a foggy spring morning in 1972, twelve-year-old Byron Hemming and his mother are driving to school in the English countryside. On the way, in a life-changing two seconds, an accident occurs. Or does it? Byron is sure it happened, but his mother, sitting right next to him in the car, has no reaction to it. Over the course of the days and weeks that follow, Byron embarks on a journey to discover what really happened–or didn’t–that fateful morning when everything changed. It is a journey that will take him–a loveable and cloistered twelve-year-old boy with a loveable and cloistered twelve-year-old boy’s perspective on life–into the murkier, more difficult realities of the adult world, where people lie, fathers and mothers fight without words, and even unwilling boys must become men. Byron will have to reconcile the dueling realities of that summer, a testament to the perseverance of the human spirit and the power of compassion.
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About the Author
Rachel Joyce is the daughter of a teacher and an architect. She remembers writing stories during childhood and studied English at Bristol University. After university, she attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and spent 20 years as an actor. After the birth of her first child she realized that she disliked being away from her family and became a writer, producing more than 20 radio plays and a television drama for the BBC. Her first novel, The Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, was written after her father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The novel was a bestseller and was named to the longlist of the Man Booker Prize in 2012.
Rachel Joyce currently lives on a farm in Gloucester with her husband, actor Paul Venables and their four children.
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