This moving novel teases us with the question of what Dickens' Pip might have been like if he had grown up in the American South of the 1960s and 1970s and faced the explosive social issues that galvanized the world in those decades: racial injustice, a war abroad, women's and gay rights, class struggle. A guilty encounter with an escaped felon, a summer spent working for an eccentric man with a mysterious past, conflicted erotic feelings for his employer's niece and nephew―these events set the stage for a journey of sexual and moral discovery that takes Newt Seward to New England, Rome, and Paris―all before returning home to confront his life's many expectations and surprises. Furnace Creek effortlessly combines elements of coming-of-age story, novel of erotic discovery, Southern Gothic fiction, and detection-mystery plot. Written with a natural storyteller's gift of imagination, it leaps the frame of Dickens' masterpiece to capture the emotional intensity of characters whose lives will haunt the reader beyond the page.