All American Boy

You can go back, but you can never go home...When actor Wally Day is called back to his hometown by his mother's mysterious plea for help, he returns to a past he has tried to forget. "Would you come home, Walter? Please?" With these desperate words from the distant mother he hasn't seen in ten years, Wally Day's carefully-constructed world collapses in on itself. For years, the handsome actor has made denial his own particular art form - from his stalled career to the emotionless embrace of the hard-edged boys who regularly traipse through his bedroom. Now, faced with this sudden intrusion from his past, Wally must confront the reasons he left his hometown of Brown's Mill in a cloud of anger, shame and guilt. As Wally unravels the dark side of his All-American family, he has a chance to make peace with the boy he was in order to become the man he needs to be. He is once more the 14-year-old living at Miss Aletha's house on the wrong side of town, the music of Saturday Night Fever providing the charged, erotic soundtrack to his life. The world was on the exuberant edge of change in those days, and Wally relives the thrill of discovery, the promise of forbidden sex - and the mistake that cost him everything. It's a journey that will take Wally back to his past - to a time when he was the good son, the smartest boy in the class, the shining picture of the All-American boy. William J. Mann has written his most powerful work yet: a searing novel about the difference between going home and finding yourself there. By turns poignant and sexy, harrowing and hopeful, "All American Boy" is filled with insight, humour, hurt, truth and the ever-renewing hope of love.