Furnace Creek
Winner, First Novel, Next Generation Indie Awards (2023)
Winner, Honorable Mention in General Fiction, Eric Hoffer Awards (2023)
Winner, Foreward's Indie Book of the Year in LGBTQ+ Fiction (2023)
Editor's Pick, Publishers Weekly (December 5, 2022)
This moving novel teases us with the question of what Dickens' Pip might have been like if he had grown up in the American South of the 1960s and 1970s and faced the explosive social issues that galvanized the world in those decades: racial injustice, a war abroad, women's and gay rights, class struggle. A guilty encounter with an escaped felon, a summer spent working for an eccentric man with a mysterious past, conflicted erotic feelings for his employer's niece and nephew―these events set the stage for a journey of sexual and moral discovery that takes Newt Seward to New England, Rome, and Paris―all before returning home to confront his life's many expectations and surprises. Furnace Creek effortlessly combines elements of coming-of-age story, novel of erotic discovery, Southern Gothic fiction, and detection-mystery plot. Written with a natural storyteller's gift of imagination, it leaps the frame of Dickens' masterpiece to capture the emotional intensity of characters whose lives will haunt the reader beyond the page.
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"A funny, moving, and true rendition of everybody's story: surviving our childhoods, which can be uniquely challenging if you're Southern, and queer. Boone is a natural novelist, and Furnace Creek is a genuine accomplishment."--Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize for The Hours
"Furnace Creek has everything brilliant novels have: characters we love, a story that touches the reader deeply, and a haunting quality that reaches beyond the pages, informing our current lives. It is also wickedly funny, that rare novel full of charming humor and sharp cultural commentary at every turn."--Dana Johnson, Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and author of Elsewhere, California
With lyric beauty, welcome frankness, and rare emotional urgency, Boone reimagines Dickens's Great Expectations in the American South, in the tumultuous 1960s, with a queer perspective and countless new and illuminating approaches. Boone's . . . innovations are always true to the realities of class, race, and sexuality of its milieu.-- "Publishers Weekly"
"A playful reimagining of Dickens, a tautly plotted thriller, a beautifully observed coming of age story: Furnace Creek is a novel that is as hard to categorize as it is to put down. It seizes you in the opening chapters and refuses to let you go."--Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Booker Prize Judge and author of Becoming Dickens
"Joseph Boone has written a page-turning novel, a spirited American retelling of an English classic. The American South is our own Dickensian England, and Boone brings both worlds vividly alive with his ebullient prose. A joyously ambitious debut!"--Marianne Wiggins, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award nominee for Evidence of Things Unseen
Boone's prose is lyrical and inventive, merging Dickensian wit and texture with a dash of Southern gothic. Just the sort of novel with which bibliophiles will be happy to linger. A queer bildungsroman in a classic, stylish package.-- "Kirkus Reviews"
The love of literature hinges not just on beautiful writing but an awareness that the stories of the past have a lot to teach us about the present. By transporting Dickens into our era, Boone demonstrates just that.--Lewis DeSimone "The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide"
No single review could possibly encompass the abundance of lives and life underway in Furnace Creek--nor should anyone wish it to. That's why we read books like this one: to get happily lost in their capacious, prodigious pages. It's a satisfyingly substantial libation built upon a potent spirit.--Greg Bills, author of Consider This Home and Fearful Symmetry
