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Informationen zum Autor Lee Cole Klappentext A TODAY SHOW #ReadWithJenna BOOK CLUB PICK An indelible love story about two very different people navigating the entanglements of class and identity and coming of age in an America coming apart at the seams In the run-up to the 2016 election, Owen Callahan, an aspiring writer, moves back to Kentucky to live with his Trump-supporting uncle and grandfather. Eager to clean up his act after wasting time and potential in his early twenties, he takes a job as a groundskeeper at a small local college, in exchange for which he is permitted to take a writing course. Here he meets Alma Hazdic, a writer in residence who seems to have everything that Owen lacks—a prestigious position, an Ivy League education, success as a writer. They begin a secret relationship, and as they grow closer, Alma—who comes from a liberal family of Bosnian immigrants—struggles to understand Owen’s fraught relationship with family and home. Exquisitely written; expertly crafted; dazzling in its precision, restraint, and depth of feeling, Groundskeeping is a novel of haunting power and grace from a prodigiously gifted young writer. Leseprobe I’ve always had the same predicament. When I’m home, in Kentucky, all I want is to leave. When I’m away, I’m homesick for a place that never was. This is what I told Alma the night we met. A grad student had thrown a party, and we’d both gone. I don’t know how long we’d been talking or how the conversation started, but I’d seen her watching me. That’s why I went over. She was watching me like I might try to steal something from her. What does that mean, a place that never was? she said. All around us, people were talking in groups of twos and threes. It was a house way out in the country, decorated in the way you’d expect of a grad student—someone with an overdeveloped sense of irony and curation, who also happened to be broke. Foreign film posters. A lamp made from antlers with a buckskin shade. Those chili pepper Christmas lights. We were standing in the pink glow of a Wurlitzer jukebox. In her right hand, she held a Solo cup and an unlit cigarette. Her long denim skirt was of the kind I associated with Pentecostals. On the other side of the Wurlitzer stood a life-sized cardboard cutout of Walt Whitman—the one where he’s got his hat cocked and his fist on his hip. I kept catching sight of him in my periphery and thinking it was another person standing there, eavesdropping. I don’t know what I’m talking about, I said. I’m a little drunk. I can tell, she said. She took a sip of her drink and slipped her bra strap back onto her shoulder. She looked around for a moment, sort of bobbing her head to the music, which was not coming from the jukebox, but from some other mysterious source. People were dancing in an attention-seeking way. She let her eyes pass over them briefly, then she turned back to me and shook her hair. It was all tangled and cut short in a kind of bob. The sort of dark hair that seemed red in a certain light—the light from the Wurlitzer, for instance. I hail from Virginia myself, she said, putting on a phony accent. Do you ever feel a sense of suffocation when you think about it? Like, you start to hyperventilate and sweat, and next thing you know, you’re completely overcome with this fear that if you go home, you’ll be trapped there and never be able to leave? The question seemed to amuse her. No, she said. Yeah, me neither, I said. She laughed at this. I grew up in DC basically, she said. So, not the real Virginia. This is my first time in Kentucky. Just visiting? Something like that. It’s not what I expected. Did you expect all of us to play banjos and tie our pants with rope? She laughed again. No, she said, I just thought it’d be—I don’t know. She gnawed on her lip and look...
