Willy Vlautin

Fifteen-year-old Charley Thompson wants a home, food on the table and a high school he can attend for more than part of a year. But as the son of a single father working in warehouses across the Pacific Northwest, Charley's been pretty much on his own. When tragic events leave him homeless weeks after their move to Portland, Oregon, Charley seeks refuge in the tack room of a run-down horse track. Charley's only comforts are his friendship with a failing...

Meet Horace Hopper, a 21-year-old farm hand in Tonopah, Nevada, who works for Mr Reece and his wife, the nearest thing he's had to family in years. But Horace, half-white half-Paiute Indian, dreams of bigger things. Leaving behind the farm and its fragile stability, he heads South to reinvent himself as the Mexican boxer Hector Hidalgo. Slowly, painfully, the possibility emerges that his dreams might not just be the delusions of a lost soul. But at...