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A debut novel from the award-winning journalist about the people in a San Francisco homeless shelter, and those who try to help--or prey on;them. "J. Malcolm Garcia has channeled the empathetic ear of Studs Terkel and the investigative skills of the best literary journalists...These stories;will remain in the heart and mind’s eye forever." --Beth Taylor, author of "An exceptionally powerful voice on behalf of the people about whom he writes." --Pulitzer Prize–winning author Dale Maharidge on Garcia''s Tom, who runs a social services agency, doesn’t play by a book of rules as much as try to bring some humanity to his work. Then there is Walter, a homeless man who can’t save himself from booze but is ready to help others. Throughout this novel told from various perspectives, the reader is introduced in intimate detail to the lives of social services workers trying to find open shelter beds and simultaneously navigating federal programs. Homeless men and women are battling sobriety and addiction and simply trying to find sustainable work and decent housing. Based on the author’s experience working with homeless people in San Francisco as a social services worker in the 1980s and 1990s, this novel vividly takes the reader into the heads of combat veterans, junkies, prostitutes and the unemployed. J. Malcolm Garcia left social services to pursue journalism so he could write about the people he worked with and share their stories--and humanity--with the broader public. “There weren’t enough shelter beds, weren’t enough detoxes, weren’t enough jobs, weren’t enough anything for the people I wanted to help.” --Tom, social worker, in
About the author
J. Malcolm Garcia worked with homeless people in San Francisco for fourteen years before he made the jump into journalism in 1997. The tragedy of September 11th, 2001, gave him the opportunity to work in Afghanistan. Since then he has written on Pakistan, Sierra Leone, Chad, Haiti, Honduras, Egypt and Argentina among other countries. Garcia is the author of The Khaarijee: A Chronicle of Friendship and War in Kabul (Beacon 2009); What Wars Leave Behind: The Faceless and Forgotten (University of Missouri Press 2014); Without A Country: The Untold Story of America's Deported Veterans (Skyhorse Press 2017); and Riding through Katrina with the Red Baron's Ghost: A Memoir of Friendship, Family and a Life Writing Stories (Skyhorse Press 2018), as well as two previous books from Seven Stories Press, The Fruit of All My Grief: Lives in the Shadows of the American Dream (2018) and Most Dangerous, Most Unmerciful: Stories from Afghanistan (2022). Garcia is a recipient of the Studs Terkel Prize for writing about the working classes and the Sigma Delta Chi Award for excellence in journalism. His work has been anthologized in Best American Travel Writing, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and Best American Essays. He lives in San Diego.
