Awards

• Commended for Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards (General Fiction) 2021

Overview

Liam is the boy, lying in the hospital, in grave condition, a bullet lodged in his head. Otto is his father, a commercial artist whose marriage has collapsed in the wake of the disaster. Paul Griner's brave novel taps directly into the vein of a uniquely American tragedy: the school shooting. We know these grotesque and sorrowful events too well. Thankfully, the characters in this drama are finely drawn human beings--those who gain our empathy, those who commit the unspeakable acts, and those conspiracy fanatics who launch a concerted campaign to convince the world that the shooting was a hoax. The Book of Otto and Liam is a suspenseful, edge-of-your-seat read and, at the same time, it is a meditation on the forms evil can take, from the irredeemable act of the shooter himself, to the anger and devastation it causes in the victims' families. Griner has managed to make an amazing, incredibly powerful book, one that is like no other.

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9781946448767

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Reviews

Every so often a writer whose work you've admired makes a sudden leap into new and fertile territory. This is the case with Paul Griner's dazzling new novel, The Book of Otto and Liam. Fast, timely, structurally daring, deeply humane, it is also wildly entertaining, in the best sense of the word: it drives the reader through it by virtue of her natural human feeling of concern. It has something important to teach us about our dangerous national addictions to violence, hostile projection, and political polarization and does so in that classic literary way: by making us care deeply about individual human beings. --George Saunders, winner of the Man Booker Prize for Lincoln in the Bardot

Griner's novel is a powerful excavation into the darkest recesses of grief. . . . Unabashedly polemical, angry, and heartbreaking. --Kirkus Reviews, starred review Every so often a writer whose work you've admired makes a sudden leap into new and fertile territory. This is the case with Paul Griner's dazzling new novel, The Book of Otto and Liam. Fast, timely, structurally daring, deeply humane, it is also wildly entertaining, in the best sense of the word: it drives the reader through it by virtue of her natural human feeling of concern. It has something important to teach us about our dangerous national addictions to violence, hostile projection, and political polarization and does so in that classic literary way: by making us care deeply about individual human beings. --George Saunders, winner of the Man Booker Prize for Lincoln in the Bardo The Book of Otto and Liam is a serious and urgent book, with the power to appall, outrage, thrill and make a reader mourn; it is also a very funny book. . . . Griner gives us a story that is at once bursting with life and hollowed out by death, that celebrates our humanity and knows all our dirty secrets. The Book of Otto and Liam is a portrait of us in our present moment, battered by a reckless and deceitful government, battling our own inurement to daily horrors, and doing our best to get on with the business of living. -- Haunted by Hoax: Paul Griner's The Book of Otto and Liam by Josh English, The Rumpus

Author Information

Paul Griner is the author of the novels Collectors, The German Woman, and Second Life, and the story collections Follow Me, (a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers choice) and Hurry Please I Want to Know (winner of the Kentucky Literary Award). He teaches writing and literature at the University of Louisville.

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