A Stone of the Heart A Novel by Tom Grimes

"Fast-paced, funny, dramatic and convincing."—Wall Street Journal

"An odd and compelling mixture of mystery, suspense and reminiscence. . . . Grimes has succeeded in illuminating the dark corners of this family while making believable a capacity for compassion and forgiveness that gives this novel an uplifting but hard-earned conclusion."—Chicago Tribune

Persuasively touching and comical . . . renders the afflictions of adolescence in both unique and universal terms."—New York Times

A moving, sometimes hilarious account of a family trying to hold itself together, A Stone of the Heart chronicles the dysfunction of a Queens, New York, Irish-Catholic family. Set in 1961, the book is narrated by the family's oldest son, fourteen-year-old Michael—overweight and obsessed with baseball statistics—who is trying to come to grips with his parents' disastrous marriage, his younger brother's retreat into silence, and his grandparents' faltering efforts to help. In baseball Michael finds the orderliness and clarity lacking in his personal world; but when Roger Maris's sixty-first home run at the end of the season both does and doesn't break Babe Ruth's record, he comes to a tenuous understanding of life's shades of gray, enabling him to begin to forgive his alcoholic father and feckless mother.

First published by Four Walls Eight Windows in 1990, A Stone of the Heart was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book.

A graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, TOM GRIMES currently directs the MFA program in creative writing at Southwest Texas State University. He is author of two other novels, Season's End and City of God, and two plays, Spec, which won a Los Angeles Dramalogue Award, and the forthcoming New World.

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A Stone of the Heart
0-87074-418-6 paper $12.95

5 3/8x8 1/4. 144 pp.
Fiction.

Publication Date: September 1997.

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