Lawnboy

Seventeen-year-old Evan’s adventure begins with mowing a neighbor’s lawn, a summer job that leads him into an unpredictable world of desire and betrayal. Estranged from his parents and his older brother, he moves in with forty-one-year-old William and begins a disastrous series of attempts to make a new home. Must he make a choice between his family and desire?

First published to wide acclaim in 1999, Lawnboy wanders the tumultuous landscape of the early 1990s, its South Florida setting as fertile and troubling as Evan’s inner life.

“Lushly emotional, romantic and tragic.”—Paper Magazine

“Paul Lisicky conveys the sweetness and lostness of a boy, and the senselessness of making him choose between extremes.”—The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review

“Lawnboy is as dreamy and lush as the south Florida landscape it inhabits. It is funny, dead-on insightful, and…sexy.”—Ann Patchett

“Nobody writes about hilarious longing the way Lisicky does. Some writers manage to be funny and sad in turn; in Lawnboy, Lisicky manages to be both at the same time. It’s beautifully written, it’s beautiful.”—Elizabeth McCracken

“This adventure-of-the-heart takes place in as evocative a landscape as any you’ll find in fiction, its Floridian decay and lushness the perfect setting for a story dense with eroticism, disillusionment, and the surprising grace notes of renewal.”—Bernard Cooper