The Best People in the World - Softcover

Justin Tussing

3.38

194 ratings by Goodreads

9780007221905: The Best People in the World

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007221908 ISBN 13: 9780007221905

Publisher: Fourth Estate Ltd, 2006

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A lyrical coming-of-age story from a brilliant new voice in American fiction. Thomas, a seventeen year old with the face of an angel, is living with his parents in a house that has begun to feel crowded; Alice, his high-school teacher and first love, is getting calls from her violent ex-husband; and Shiloh, a survivor of a life lived on the fringes, has seen his shack swept away by the mighty Ohio. They run away together - in pursuit of an ideal that none of them are quite able to define - finding shelter in an abandoned farmhouse in the hills of Vermont. But as the light off the lake turns grey and the leaves go brittle, outside forces gather. The sharp knives of dependency and deprivation begin to flash, and as the inevitable tragedy of intimacy unfolds, Thomas begins to see this time - when he was with 'the best people in the world' - come to an end. A journey, a coming of age, a novel of our need to hold onto meaning in whatever form it may take, "The Best People in the World" is a masterful illumination of a moment when everything was perfect and the realization that nothing gold can stay.

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About the Author:

Justin Tussing went to the University of New Hampshire and received his MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop, where he was a Teaching/Writing Fellow. He has received numerous fellowships and is a former director of the Iowa Young Writers Studio. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts. This is his first novel.

From Publishers Weekly:

Starred Review. What might have been the stuff of boyish fantasies—an affair with a teacher, running away from home, living off the land—goes frighteningly awry in this unsettling but bleakly beautiful debut novel. It's 1972 in Paducah, Ky., and quiet 17-year-old Thomas Mahey falls into an intense affair with his 25-year-old history teacher, Alice Lowe. Independently, they both befriend Shiloh Tanager, a wily, good-hearted local anarchist, and the three hit the road for rural Vermont, determined to live "off the grid." No sooner does the trio settle into an abandoned house than things begin to unravel. Thomas is torn between loyalty to Shiloh and an all-consuming love for Alice, and riddled with guilt for wordlessly leaving his parents. Meanwhile, the homesteaders' efforts at growing food fail. When an unwelcome visitor from Shiloh's past appears, he brings to a head the increasingly desperate atmosphere of secrets and resentment that their idyll has become. Tussing skillfully crafts simultaneously visionary and demented characters (chapters following two men who investigate "miracles" for the Catholic Church punctuate the trio's story), and when an element of the supernatural infiltrates the narrative it seems normal for the deliberately off-kilter people who inhabit this odd but honest, appealing American story. (Feb.)
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