One Saturday night in Las Vegas, twelve-year-old Newell Ewing goes out with a friend and doesn't come home. In the aftermath of his disappearance, his mother, Lorraine, makes daily pilgrimages to her son's room and tortures herself with memories. Equally distraught, the boy's father, Lincoln, finds himself wanting to comfort his wife even as he yearns for solace, a loving touch, any kind of intimacy. As the Ewings navigate the mystery of what's become of their son, the circumstances surrounding Newell's vanishing and other events on that same night reverberate through the lives of seemingly disconnected strangers: a comic book illustrator in town for a weekend of debauchery; a painfully shy and possibly disturbed young artist; a stripper who imagines moments from her life as if they were movie scenes; a bubbly teenage wiccan anarchist; a dangerous and scheming gutter punk; a band of misfit runaways. The people ofBeautiful Childrenare "urban nomads," each with a past to hide and a pain to nurture, every one of them searching for salvation and barreling toward destruction, weaving their way through a neon underworld of sex, drugs, and the spinning wheels of chance. In this masterly debut novel, Charles Bock mixes incandescent prose with devious humor to capture Las Vegas with unprecedented scope and nuance and to provide a glimpse into a microcosm of modern America. Beautiful Children is an odyssey of heartache and redemptionheralding the arrival of a major new writer. Advance praise forBeautiful Children "Charles Bock has delivered an anxious, angry, honest first novel filled with compassion and clarity.
Beautiful Children is fast, violent, sexy andlike a potentially dangerous rideit could crash at any moment but never does. The language has a rhythm wholly its ownat moments it is stunning, near genius. This book is big and wildit is as though Bock saved up everything for this moment. A major new talent." A. M. Homes "Beautiful Childrencareens from the seedy to the beautiful, the domestic to the epic, all with huge and exacting heart." Jonathan Safran Foer "Beautiful Childrenis the best first novel I've read in yearscertainly the best first novel of our newborn century.
Charles Bock has written a masterpiece: tragic, comic, sexy, chilling, far-reaching, and wiseat once an accusation and a consolation, and a lucid portrait of what is happening at the very heart of our culture, and what it means to be a young American today." Sean Wilsey.