The Life I Lead - Hardcover

Dave Brewer's perfect life with a loving wife and young daughter in a small town in Indiana is turned upside down by an encounter with Nathan, a young loner--in whom he recognizes himself--with whom his growing compassion is gradually transformed into a spiritual and physical obsession. A first novel. 25,000 first printing.

ebut novel about obsessional passion and a morally ambiguous love, about an upstanding family man in an Indiana town who finds himself caught in the grip of desire for a young boy.

Dave Brewer, married to Tara--they have an eighteen-month-old daughter--is a meter reader for Indiana Gas. He helps his ailing father. He drives a bus for the Norris Road Baptist Church. He enjoys a good round of golf. He has everything he wants: family, community, a steady job. Until one day at a public pool, he sees a boy, a quiet loner, in whom he sees himself.

The boy, Nathan, has cut his foot at the pool. Something in his scared, innocent eyes awakens a powerful compassion in Dave that gradually emerges as something more: an obsession both physical and spiritual ("I feel what I feel for him in the back of my mouth, in the muscles in my hands").

As his interest in Nathan evolves from sympathy to love, Dave can no longer deny the complexity of his feelings--he desires Na