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The Garden of Last Days

3.38 of 5 stars 3.38 · rating details · 2,783 ratings · 625 reviews

“So good, so damn compulsively readable, that I can hardly believe it.” —Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly

In his stunning follow-up to the #1 best-selling House of Sand and Fog, Andre Dubus draws us into the lives of three deeply flawed, driven people whose paths intersect on a September night in Florida. April, a stripper, has brought her daughter to work at the Puma Cl

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Paperback, 544 pages

Published June 1st 2009 by W. W. Norton & Company (first published 2002)

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Jun 12, 2008 Mike rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: people who found "Crash" too complicated, and too short

Recommended to Mike by: my own inner obsessive, demanding I read every 9/11 novel

To draw a quote from the book itself, this is one of those "And nothing happens by mistake" kind of narratives, every piss-poor choice by a character leading her or him down an overdetermined path toward melodramatic near- and actual tragedies (and some measure of cathartic redemption). Think "Crash," with a dollop of 9/11 thrown in to give the thing a bit more zeitgeistian heft.

I was able to take the hyperbole of plot in Dubus' last, big-selling _House of Sand and Fog_, because he does manage t...more To draw a quote from the book itself, this is one of those "And nothing happens by mistake" kind of narratives, every piss-poor choice by a character leading her or him down an overdetermined path toward melodramatic near- and actual tragedies (and some measure of cathartic redemption). Think "Crash," with a dollop of 9/11 thrown in to give the thing a bit more zeitgeistian heft.

I was able to take the hyperbole of plot in Dubus' last, big-selling _House of Sand and Fog_, because he does manage these flashes of strange insight that seem startling, that break away from the path carved by the march toward fate. E.g., a customer at the novel's main strip club "in an out-of-fashion tie" is "looking hard not at Retro's ass behind her leather shorts but at the back of her head, like that's where he wanted to be--in Retro's brain. To see if she thought about him at all." Great--and tells me something fascinating about men in such clubs. Of course, then Dubus goes on (and on, and on) telling me very precisely and explicitly what men in such clubs are thinking, and such insights drown in the wash.

Far too often, his characters are so determined by their fate that the writing is nothing but a thin recitation of details you expect, once you've drawn a quick bead on their type and the generic conventions toward which such types tend. Worse, you rarely get the kind of off-center characterization that reveals (like above), instead every character has a hectoring inner voice (which sounds suspiciously the same, no matter who's doing the thinking), and that voice hammers home every damn point about each character's frustrations, limited point-of-view, and inevitable misguided choices to be made soon. (But not soon enough. 500+ pages.) E.g., in this _Garden_ the hectoring inner voice of drunken, sort-of-misogynist, consumed-by-rage AJ is like one long recitation of things I knew the minute he appeared on the scene groping a stripper, so when he sees bugs flying into a bugzapper (and wonders how they could be so stupid) or imagines his life as a bad hand dealt to him (and all he can do is play the cards) or when his only companion is his F-150 (or whatever number--his bigass Truck), I wondered if Dubus actually knows any working-class, drunken, sort-of-misogynist, consumed-by-rage guys, or if he'd simply read the Writer's manual about how to write that character.

I'm clearly liking this less as my review goes on, and on.

Let's wrap up. Dubus clearly has the best of intentions, and his prose isn't the weakest of vessels. But even without the insertion of a 9/11 hijacker into the club, I would have found this difficult to believe, increasingly annoying to read, and ultimately impossible to care about. The 9/11 subplot underlines and italicizes and puts fifty exclamation points on the book's weaknesses. The hijacker Bassam's inner hectoring voice uses the occasional Arabic term (but often enough, and in obvious enough context, so as not to confuse), and his sort-of-misogynist, consumed-by-rage approach to America, like AJ's mindset broken from pure hate by flashes of empathy he doesn't know how to handle, struck me as both unincisive and a bit exploitative. Yet another 9/11 fiction that, despite some nod toward the cultural & religious dissonance and the geopolitical dimensions underlying Bassam's character, imagines the event as simplistic metonymy for a very conventional psycho-drama of domestic space and family life disrupted and torn apart.

Oh, and since the estimable Erik S complained about Richard Price's (over)use of dialogue to tell the tale in _Lush Life_ in his smart and reasoned review on this site, let me draw a comparison to Dubus' hamfisted use of interior monologue, a rush of prose meant to reveal so much about character and context that I felt like I was reading diary entries, not a novel. Give me dialogue, and some uncertainty about what's inside a character's head and behind her/his motives any day, man!(less)

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Jul 04, 2008 max rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: library

I read this book cover to cover, which attests to its efficient prose despite its 500+ page length. Andre Dubus' trick is to advance the action of the loosely interlocking characters in cinematic mini-chapters, each time completely inhabiting the persona and neuroses of its subject.

Dubus is an accomplished observer and has clearly researched his Floridian subjects well. Especially fascinating are his antiheroes, a down-on-his-luck contractor and father trying to find a way to do right in all the...more

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Jun 12, 2008 Melissa Madrid rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Those who like a good tale and don't care how well it is told

Recommended to Melissa by: Powells

This book fits squarely into my category of a good idea poorly executed. The promise of the book lies in its gritty characters and the outward ripple into their lives from a point of chance intersection. And of course I was drawn by the clever concept of the chance intersection being taken from a footnote to the headlines of the biggest story of the young 21st Century.

But the execution is a big pile overwrought melodrama. My problem is that the prose is pedestrian and the story is drawn with a...more

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Aug 10, 2009 Maureen rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2009, ultimate-favorites

Gripping me from the first page.
Dubus knows charctres so well,it is as if he grinds the human being down the original dust and then scattters that dust across the page.
The back jacket blurb for this novel does not do it justice. This not a book about "where were you September 10,2001?". This is a book about the choices we make everyday that keep us and everyone around us holding on to what is our reality,sometimes with the edges of our fingernails.
Does this book have a deeper human lesson to be...more

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Oct 03, 2009 Eileen Granfors rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: highly-unusual, women, historical-fiction

This is a gritty and graphic novel of the last days of one of the 9/11 highjackers and his chance meeting with April, an exotic dancer. Although the club scenes are filled with salacious details of the strip club life, the protagonist April retains her sense of self and has the reader hoping she will find her way.

For more about this book, see my review on amazon.com under the title and my reviewer's name, EGranfors.

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May 09, 2013 Christopher Allen rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

My reading of this novel began so hopefully. At AWP a friend made me aware of the author's existence. He was there at AWP, and of course I had no idea who he was. I hate that. So I bought a book. And to be fair, I liked--maybe even loved--the first 50 or so pages.

Then the narrative began to fall apart. It's a multi-POV affair, which can be great. This one isn't. The attempt to imitate the Egyptian-sounding foreigner is corny but not cornier than the attempt to imitate the good old boy who's work...more

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Jan 21, 2009 Michael rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2009

Recommended by Stephen King as one of the best books of 2008, I picked this one up with high expectations.

King's made some great recommendations in the past and helped me discover the joys of reading Laura Lippman (for which I will be eternally grateful).

But as for "Garden of Last Days," it was more of a miss than a hit. I enjoyed the story, but maybe my expectations were ratcheted up a bit too high after hearing King heap praise on the novel. It's a story with 9/11 firmly at the center, though...more

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Aug 05, 2008 Ray rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: buy

Well, I read all the other GoodReads reviews and don't have much to add. There are lots of sharp insights below.

In short, yes this was a book told from probably too many perspectives (I counted at least 9 distinct points of view), there was a bit of over-writing, and there is powerlessness/over-sexualization attached to some of the female characters. And the September 11th terrorist sub-plot borders on the ridiculous...but...I liked it.

I like a chunky book. I like a book with a strong sense of...more

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Aug 05, 2008 Brian Calandra rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The prose is a bit purple, the situations overheated, and the borderline fetishistic look into the mind of a 9/11 hijacker creeps towards the "what we hope they're thinking and are like," instead of what they may actually be like. The central plot, though, which I won't give away, is riveting, and based on the House of Sand and Fog I assumed the worst. I kept turning the pages and couldn't put it down, and found myself rooting for various characters, too.

That said, this is really just the House...more

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Jun 22, 2008 JoAnn/QuAppelle rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I am so annoyed with myself for wasting the hours I spent to read this. I had to force myself to pick it up every day. I loved Dubus's first book so much that I kept hoping this would get better and some characters would appear who would be even the slightest bit appealing or meaningful. Never happened. And yes, I know life has a seamy side, but that does not make this novel any more appealing. It made me feel dirty.

But the reviewers loooooove it.

Amazon says that this book is 384 pages but my...more

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Jul 07, 2008 Woodge rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I hadn't read this author before and when I was browsing some comments on this book on Amazon, it looked like most people enjoyed this but consider The House of Sand and Fog a better book. I first heard of this after Stephen King's glowing review in EW. It's an engrossing story about an exotic dancer named April who brings her 3-year-old daughter Franny to work one night when her regular babysitter is hospitalized. April had no other backup babysitters (I know how that feels). Two of the other m...more

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May 02, 2009 Kelly rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2009, florida, favorites

"The Garden of Last Days" takes place within the final few days leading up to 9/11. The story follows a small cast of characters whose lives become interconnected during one long night in a strip club. Dubus delves into every thought, feeling, and action of each of these characters, superbly drawing the reader into an understanding of what motivates the choices made by these individuals. We certainly may not always condone these choices, but we do understand them. As the story unfolds, you truly...more

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Dec 09, 2008 Qmiller added it · review of another edition

I taught this book in my course on 9/11 literature, though it has less (directly) to do with that infamous day than the other books in the course did. Yet 9/11 weighs heavily on the narrative. It takes place largely in and around a seedy Florida strip club (I realize there is at least one redundancy in that phrase). It's really a series of character studies. I've read everything by Andre and consider him a friend: he made a second visit to campus this semester at my request and visited two of my...more

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Jul 23, 2008 Barbie rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Author Andre Dubus explores human relationships and motivation in this story that brings together 4 unlikely characters in the seamier side of life in south Florida: April, who works as a stripper to pay the bills and care for her young daughter Franny; Jean, April's landlady, babysits for Franny only to discover that the little girl gives her life a new purpose; AJ, a lonely young man estranged from his wife and a frequent customer to the strip club where April works; and April's rich foreign c...more

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Jan 01, 2012 Frederick Bingham rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The main character of this book is April, a stripper in Sarasota FL. One night the person who does the regular babysitting for her takes ill, and she has to take her 4-year-old daughter to her club while she works. She puts her in the club's office with some videos and goes to do her job. That night one of the customers is a dumb redneck named AJ. AJ gets too frisky with one of the other dancers and gets thrown out, and his wrist broken at the same time. Another customer is Bassam, an Arab who i...more

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Mar 08, 2009 Fredsky rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This garden of flawed characters begins with a stripper bringing her 3-year-old daughter to work because her sitter is sick. This night at the club brings together many creepy people and their interactions are described in tawdry detail. One by one, new stereotypes are introduced. The night goes on, the book goes on. Even as a mere reader, I resented being stuck for so long with a bunch of strippers and their parasites in a dark, ugly club. It all seemed tedious to me.

Although even the terroris...more

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Jan 29, 2009 Tony rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction-mainstream

Dubus III, Andre. THE GARDEN OF LAST DAYS. (2008). ***. It’s tough to follow an act like, “The House of Sand and Fog.” But you have to judge a book on its own merits. This one has a few, but could have been a lot tighter than it was. It’s the story of the clash of cultures and the clash within cultures. It’s the story of people making the wrong decisions and building on them. The action centers around the Puma Club for Men, where all of the characters meet and then depart. April – Spring at the...more Dubus III, Andre. THE GARDEN OF LAST DAYS. (2008). ***. It’s tough to follow an act like, “The House of Sand and Fog.” But you have to judge a book on its own merits. This one has a few, but could have been a lot tighter than it was. It’s the story of the clash of cultures and the clash within cultures. It’s the story of people making the wrong decisions and building on them. The action centers around the Puma Club for Men, where all of the characters meet and then depart. April – Spring at the Club – is a stripper/dancer at the Puma. She is an unmarried mother of a little girl, Franny. Normally, her landlady, Jean, watches Franny while April is off doing her thing, but one night she tells her she can’t. She has to go into the hospital to get checked out. She thinks she is having a heart attack. April is forced to take Franny, a three-year old, with her to the club and have one of the matrons watch over her. She gets selected by one of the customers to go back with him to the Champagne, a special series of rooms where the girls dance – or whatever – for the customer on a one-to-one basis for one hour. This customer has a wad of money, that April sees as an opportunity to add to her house buying fund. Turns out that the customer is Arabic. His name is Bassam. He is in this country on a mission – taking flight lessons in Florida. We begin to suspect the rest of the plot at this point, especially as we get to share the thinking of Bassam and his hate for Americans. Meanwhile, nobody has been watching over little Franny. She wanders around and finally wanders out of the club, where she is found by another customer who has just been 86’d by one of the bouncers. He decides to rescue Franny from a mother who is unworthy of her – although he is under a restraining order not to go near his wife and young son. He sorely misses his son and believes that he has been a good father and knows what a kid should have in the way of parenting. After lots of self-delusional thinking, he takes Franny in his truck and drives around with her for most of the night and then decides to leave her in someone’s car where she can be found. When it’s found that Franny has gone missing, April goes berserk, the other girls in the club go crazy, the bouncer finds that he is responsible, too, and decides to help on his own, and Bassam finally leaves to meet up with his other Arabic friends. This is a very episodic novel. That worked well with “The Bridge of San Luis Rey,” but it doesn’t really work all that well here. At the end, you wonder what the book was really supposed to be about. I’ll wait for Dubus’ next novel.(less)

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Jan 26, 2009 Linda rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: current-novels, current-events-social-history

It took me a while to see that April, the single-mom, stripper who is the main character of the story, is culpable for her choices. And, I don't know that she ever quite blames herself for her troubles. But, she has her own version of the American dream!

There are many supporting characters in this story and Dubus gives attention and sympathy to each of them. Remember the Joan Baez song with it's refrain: There but poor fortune go you go I. I identified with so many of them, especially the older...more

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Nov 12, 2012 Jonathan Briggs rated it 3 of 5 stars

A JON AND HIS MA BOOK CLUB SELECTION

Al Bundy knew the score: It's all happening at the nudie bar.

Andre Dubus III goes to a Florida "gentlemen's" club for the follow-up to "House of Sand and Fog," his Oprah-beloved best-seller of middle-brow misery. Like "Sand and Fog," "The Garden of Last Days" is full of self-pitying, self-made victims digging themselves ever deeper into self-inflicted predicaments.

Up on the stage of the Puma Club dances April, aka Spring, a divorced mother shaking her ya-yas t...more

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Jul 24, 2012 Sally Maria rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Actually, I listened to the audio of this book, which I believe was over ten hours.

I was incredibly impressed with the House of Sand and Fog, which led me to this book. A number of reviewers have remarked that it's a difficult book to get into, but I didn't find that with the audio edition.

Dubus is a master at juggling the stories of his characters, and the unpredictable ways lives collide. I also admire the fact that in this book, as well as in Sand and Fog, he contrasts cultures, broadening...more

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May 29, 2012 Eva Nickelson rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I did not enjoy reading this book. For my taste, there were too many characters, there was a tense change for one of the characters, there was too much redundancy in the story, and there were too many pages. Given the plot points, I expected more urgency in the story, but I didn't catch that feeling while reading. I put this book down more than once, only to pick it up again because I made a pledge to myself to read all of the library book club books, even if I couldn't attend the book club.
Esse...more

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Mar 08, 2012 Jeanette rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I have to admit to a personal bias for this author. He taught one of my creative writing classes at Emerson and he is one of those few professors that stay with you. When you can still recall lectures from over twenty years ago, you know he was doing something right.

Anyway to get back to the book, like the House of Sand and Fog, this novel reads like a train wreck, the suspense building as you plummet down a long hill, knowing that when the ride ends it will result in disaster.

Unlike the House o...more

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Nov 29, 2011 Maduck831 rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

“And it was her smile the men liked because she was always smiling and it never looked phony.” (39) “she began to wonder if she’d find any help or comfort or meaning in this world at all before she was dust no one would remember or speak of or even think about in passing while reaching for the butter or unlocking the door.” (52) “Tired of working so hard for nothing but bad feelings in return.” (121) “God was for the weak, that’s what she really thought. It was for people who can’t face that we’...more

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Oct 23, 2011 Suzanne Moore rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: thriller, nominations-to-sort

When April's babysitter falls ill without notice, she is forced to take her young daughter to work with her. April works as a stripper at the Puma Club for men ... not the ideal place for a young child. Leaving her baby with the owner's wife in the office, April is a nervous wreck, (although her professionalism won't allow her to show it) as she entertains a foreigner in the VIP room.

Meanwhile an over zealous patron is thrown out for getting too close to one of the dancers. As things progress B...more

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Oct 04, 2011 Jay Glasgow rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book was good in some parts, and lacking in others. The whole writing style was odd and somewhat superfluous for the narrative that it was, but the way the narrative changed well made it a good narrative. The way the writer changed his writing for each character was a good idea, and could have been something great, but it wasn’t executed well enough.
Each character had a certain narrative niche, a small quirk that made the character, and for most of them, this small niche was all the chara...more This book was good in some parts, and lacking in others. The whole writing style was odd and somewhat superfluous for the narrative that it was, but the way the narrative changed well made it a good narrative. The way the writer changed his writing for each character was a good idea, and could have been something great, but it wasn’t executed well enough.
Each character had a certain narrative niche, a small quirk that made the character, and for most of them, this small niche was all the character they had. There was little symbolism or real showing of the character to the reader, very little considering that it was a literary novella. Out of all of the different narratives the only person that had character that was more than a general cliché was the Muslim. He was the only one to get a decent amount of background character as well as the background information that the other character received. Each of them had a past, that was extremely defined, but he was the only one with a past character, that changed into the now him, then developed into an even more different person as the story progressed. The rest of the characters had a hard time being something other than stagnant. Jeanne never developed a character, she only did things and accomplished self made missions, she didn't change as a person because of her achievement. Franny stayed a scared girl, adding plot, but not changing, AJ never changed his character either, he just accomplished his goals, he stayed the same from when he was introduced, they just added more detail to him, no character. April did nearly the same, yes the plot made her think and change some of her ways, but she didn't change her character, all she did was for her and her daughters happy living, the fact that she didn't like working at a strip club stay stagnant throughout,and never swayed into more hate, of acceptance. She became stagnant like the rest. The author could have done much more to further better these characters, to make them more rich and fantastic, or at least give the reader more feeling for them than just curiosity. Never once sis i scream at a characters bad choice, of give a good laugh to a joke, or feel elated at an accomplished goal. There was no connection between me and these underdeveloped characters.
The description narrative of the areas was very real and full and rich, but it never went beyond that. It stayed a lively environment with much detail, but it never gained a personality, or image, that was more than just a description. Such as when he described AJ's house, he never picked up on any detail that added character, he said the description of the house but didn't add anything, such as it was a lonely house, or that it was withered and yet new and out of place, or was invading the prairie it was in, he just described a normal built by himself house.
All in all, the author had a good idea, had some good talent, put it all down on the page, and then botched the execution. I can see the author becoming something more than this with more practice of this type of narrative, but this one try itself doesn’t hold much merit other than to say this author will be good later on. It lacked depth, it lacked character, it lacked a good connection to the reader, and it lacked voice. It had good syntax, diction, plot, detail, scenery, and over all, it was a splendid idea for a novel.
(less)

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Jul 31, 2011 Charles rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The Garden of Last Days tantilized - Florida and strippers... and then it became much, much more. Andre Dubus has a descriptive style of writing that tugs you along as the characters develop and you are entwined in their lives and what shapes those lives. Mr. Dubus peels back the suductiveness of the "gentlemans club" and lays it bare in front of us. He turns the lights up bright enough to see the threadbare and beer soaked carpeting - literally.

Regardless of your culture or background we all lo...more The Garden of Last Days tantilized - Florida and strippers... and then it became much, much more. Andre Dubus has a descriptive style of writing that tugs you along as the characters develop and you are entwined in their lives and what shapes those lives. Mr. Dubus peels back the suductiveness of the "gentlemans club" and lays it bare in front of us. He turns the lights up bright enough to see the threadbare and beer soaked carpeting - literally.

Regardless of your culture or background we all long for the same things in the end... to connect and to belong to someone and something that provides meaning and value and purpose in this all too often challenging world. Some of us make that connection as a spouse or as a parent. Others of us search for something we believe to be more "spiritual" with the promise of a better life beyoned this one. Whatever the connection, once made it owns you for eternity. We may struggle with it and question it or lose sight of it, but in the end - once the connection is made it owns our very fiber and being... it drives our actions and decisions. For a lot of us, the importance of that connection is never so real, so all consuming as when the connection is broken or taken away. It is our connections, or promise of a connection or the lack of a connection that will determine our resolve as beings with purpose. Without purpose and connection in this world there is a gnawing emptiness that seeks to be filled.

A number of worlds and lives randomly collide in Flordia and the connections that are made, lost or that remain empty will change a number of those lives. The ending is somewhat anticlimatic - you find yourself saying "Yeah, I kinda thought that's where this was headed." Overall, the ending added very little to the overall plot.

Mr. Dubus does an amazing job of getting the reader in the heads of some of the pivitol characters. At first the level of detail serves the storyline well. However, as the story moves along the level of detail starts over burden. At times it felt like the author was just filling pages. There were long stretches with AJ's saga that I just started flipping pages - it didnt take away from the story.

(less)

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Apr 07, 2011 Jen P rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

So far this is my favorite book in recent history (as far as modern literature goes).
I could not put this book down from page one. Andre Dubus is a genius, and his writing is thought-provoking, powerful and emotional - a literary trifecta.
If you haven't read this book, I highly recommend it - you won't be disappointed.
Some books end up being a waste of time (especially when you have a short amount of free time to begin with)...but not this one. I gladly gave up many hours of sleep so I could fin...more

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May 29, 2010 Sarah rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The Garden of Last Days is a perfect literary example of masterful storytelling. It doesn't matter that the book is lengthier than average at over 530 pages because you won't notice it or feel overwhelmed; you'll simply enjoy the reading experience.

Andre Dubus III opens The Garden of Last Days on a lazy Florida afternoon and we are introduced to April and Franny; a single young woman who works for a strip club and her three-year old daughter. April's usual babysitter, Jean, is in the hospital, a...more

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Jan 10, 2010 Zhanna rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The author does an amazing job describing a story during the 3 or 4 days leading up to 9/11 in this fictional, uniquely captivating novel. I was pleasantly surprised to find out at the end from Dubus' epilogue that quite a lot was actually true with respect to Bassam, one of the hijackers, and his partners. Adds a different perspective, the angle he worked is refreshing. Written from the viewpoint of the various main characters, I could hardly put the book down, despite it being consistently sad...more

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Dec 06, 2009 Charles Matthews rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Novelists keep being drawn to the events of September 11, 2001, hoping to confine the heinous imponderables of that day into the shapings of fiction. Writers as various as Jay McInerney (The Good Life), Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close) and John Updike (Terrorist) have made their attempts at it.

It’s hardly surprising that Andre Dubus III should join them with his new novel, The Garden of Last Days. Even before 9/11, in his 1999 novel House of Sand and Fog, he gave us a s...more

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About Andre Dubus III

Andre Dubus III is the author of Townie, The Garden of Last Days, and House of Sand and Fog (an Oprah Book Club pick and a finalist for the National Book Award). His father, Andre Dubus, was a noted short story writer. Andre Dubus III lives with his family north of Boston.

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“But even in September, Thursday was a big money night, seven to eight hundred take-home, and that's what April concentrated on as she drove, Franny's chin starting to loll against her chest—April made herself think of that fat roll of tens and twenties she'd have at closing, how she'd fold it into the front pocket of her jeans then go to the house mom's office off the dressing room and give Tina a hundred before she found Franny in her pj's on Tina's brown vinyl couch, and she'd try not to think of the walls above Tina's desk covered with dancers' schedules and audition Polaroids of naked women, some of them under postcards from girls who came and went.” — 1 person liked it

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BBCode	[url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6437444-the-garden-of-last-days?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348328951l/6437444.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6437444-the-garden-of-last-days?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]The Garden of Last Days by Andre Dubus III[/url]

The Garden of Last Days

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