Flesh Wounds

Flesh Wounds is an achingly real, deeply felt first novel in the tradition of Anne Tyler and Ordinary People–a novel that shows us an American family with such startling clarity and compassion that we are completely drawn into their world.

When the police come to arrest Hal Lamm, a Minneapolis salesman, for abusing his 13-year-old granddaughter Becky, his entire family must come to terms with its secrets and unhealed wounds. Hal’s wife Phyllis, after decades of denial and emotional estrangement, finally confronts him. Of their four grown-up children, Ellie, herself once abused by Hal, had sought to find strength by moving away, and now discovers it back in the midst of her family. Cal, the youngest son, is a lawyer whose instinct is to defend Hal-until he becomes a father himself. Most poignantly of all, Becky, unconsoled by the parties and gifts her parents give her, and suspicious of the psychiatrist she is now required to see, keeps her rage hidden-and nearly tears herself apart.

Flesh Wounds is a novel that grips us and does not let go until its genuinely uplifting climax of hard-earned reconciliation. Mick Cochrane, a writer who makes the ordinary seem extraordinary and can find unexpected moments of grace amid the everyday, has created characters so real we feel we know them and scenes that shake us with their dramatic intensity. Already winning the plaudits of excited early readers, Flesh Wounds is that all-too-rare novel that goes straight to the heart.