Tietam Brown - Hardcover

"Brilliant and disturbing... A novel of immense power and subtlety" (Guardian)

"Take JD Salinger, throw in a bit of Dostoevsky, sprinkle with Bret Easton Ellis, and you're getting there" (Guardian)

"Foley brilliantly charts the young Andy's emotional deprivation and the adolescent Andy's romantic confusion" (Daily Mail) --Daily Mail

"Raw, funny and moving stuff. Drop your preconceptions on entry and enjoy a real book by a real writer" (Big Issue) --Big Issue

"You'll be gripped by this great read" (Daily Mirror) --Daily Mirror

Destined to be one of the most talked about books of 2003: a brilliant first novel by the world's most famous wrestler In the world of WWF wrestling, Mick Foley is a legend. The author of two best-selling autobiographies, he has now written his first novel, a book of such brilliance that it will astonish the critics while delighting his millions of fans. Antietam (Andy) Brown - named for the great-great-grandfather who died on that Civil War battleground - was an overgrown ten-year-old when he killed his abusive foster father and the teenager who tried to rape him. Now, after seven years in reform school, he is presumably free to make a new start as a student at Conestoga High School. But he is immediately thrust into the violent and debased life of his real father (known as Tietam) - an oddly charismatic man who seems addicted to bodybuilding, beer-swilling and 'bareback riding', his words for his serial womanizing. Swimming through a morass of crudity and violence (he's made an enemy of the football coach and his pack of steroid-pumped teens), Andy is stunned to find himself pursued by the high school homecoming queen - a born-again Christian - and to discover that his father has a hidden cache of books on serious, even esoteric, subjects and a hidden past. Obsessed with the idea of offering his girlfriend a pure love and driven to find out whether he's descended from a monster or a hero, Andy searches for the truth in the dangerous currents of his father's past and present - in a novel that is a zany and deeply moving celebration of the human spirit.