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T.C.Boyle

The Harder They Come

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Sten Stenson, Vietnam veteran and retired school principal, and his wife, Carolee, are on a cruise in Costa Rica when their coach excursion is hijacked. Sten's military training overtakes him and within moments one of the attackers lies dead. The rest flee and Sten finds himself hailed a hero by the tour group and everyone back home.Meanwhile, in the redwood forests north of San Francisco, Sara — a farrier who refuses to recognize the authority of the government — is arrested after failing to cooperate with police at a routine stop. A chance meeting with twenty-five-year-old Adam, Sten and Carolee's unstable son, sparks a strange but passionate relationship fuelled by a mutual hatred of the law. Adam, an angry and misunderstood outsider, perennially dressed in camouflage and with his head shaved to the bone, has an unhealthy obsession with nineteenth-century mountain man John Colter. As Adam's views and behaviour become steadily more extreme, he descends into a spiral of fanatical violence that is impossible for his family or Sara to halt.The latest novel by internationally bestselling author T. C. Boyle, The Harder They Come is as timely as it is provocative. A deep and disturbing meditation on the roots of American gun violence, it explores the fine line between heroism and savagery, and just how far a parent can be held accountable for the actions of his child.
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420 printed pages
Publication year
2015
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  • Hương Xuânshared an impression8 years ago
    🚀Unputdownable

    Interesting!

Quotes

  • Emily Morganhas quoted7 years ago
    He dialed room service, ordered the drinks and food and went out in his robe to sit on the veranda and brood over the views of the city and the bright rippling dance of the sea beneath him, wide awake suddenly when all he’d wanted all day was a nap.
  • Aleks Zhanghas quoted7 years ago
    THERE ARE THE NAMELESS fears and there are the named ones too. When he was a child his nightmares weren’t of ghouls or monsters or people chasing him with knives and axes and decapitated heads, but amorphous things, neither human nor animal, the fear that sat in your stomach, inside you, and you couldn’t define it or shake it either.
  • Aleks Zhanghas quoted8 years ago
    The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.
    It has never yet melted.
    D. H. LAWRENCE
    Studies in Classic American Literature

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