Owen King

"An ambitious and warmhearted first novel" (Entertainment Weekly) from Owen King--the epic tale of a young man coming to terms with his life in the aftermath of the spectacularly bizarre failure of his first film. SAM DOLAN is a young man coming to terms with his life in the process and aftermath of making his first film. He has a difficult relationship with his father, B-movie actor Booth Dolan--a boisterous, opinionated, lying lothario whose screen legacy falls somewhere between cult hero and pathetic. Allie, Sam's dearly departed mother, was a woman whose only fault, in Sam's eyes, was her eternal affection for his father. Also included in the cast of indelible characters: a precocious, frequently violent half-sister; a conspiracy-theorist second wife; an Internet-famous roommate; a contractor who can't stop expanding his house; a happy-go-lucky college girlfriend and her husband, a retired Yankees catcher; the morose producer of a true-crime show; and a slouching indie-film legend. Not to mention a tragic sex monster. Unraveling the tumultuous, decades-spanning story of the Dolan family's friends, lovers, and adversaries, Double Feature is about letting go of everything--regret, resentment, dignity, moving pictures, the dead--and taking it again from the top. Against the backdrop of indie filmmaking, college campus life, contemporary Brooklyn, and upstate New York, Owen King's epic debut novel combines propulsive storytelling with mordant wit and brims with a deep understanding of the trials of ambition and art, of relationships and life, and of our attempts to survive it all.

In his wry novella, Owen King conjures an eccentric North-Eastern American family whose personal strife mirrors the political turmoil of our time. George is the teenaged son of a single mother, and the only grandson of a family of union organisers in Maine. George's grandfather Henry, obsessed with the outcome of the 2000 election, has planted a giant billboard of homage to Al Gore in his front yard that he suspects has been defaced by the paperboy, now a sworn enemy. Meanwhile, George's mother is about to marry Dr Vic, who besides being possess by an almost royal obliviousness, may even have voted for George W Bush. George's efforts to aid his endearingly cranky grandfather and to undermine his mother's marriage reflect on a central question for our times: How will we fight? All together, or all alone? A heartwarming, funny and hugely inventive tale from a young writer set to become one of the most exciting talents on the Faber list.