Author(s): Joyce Maynard

World fiction

The dog days of August...All summer long, thirteen-year-old Henry kept hoping that something different would happen, but it never did. Then, just as the Labour Day weekend gets under way, in the Pricemart where Henry's mother, Adele, on one of her rare forays out of the house and into the wider world has taken him to buy trousers for school, a bleeding man approaches Henry and asks for help. Frank is a man with a secret, and a man on the run. Adele is a wounded soul whose dreams of family life and romantic dancing died years ago, even before her husband left her and their son Henry. Henry is a teenage loner, unaware that he is about to learn some of life's most important lessons. In the space of five days, both their lives are changed forever.