Karl Geary, "MONTPELIER PARADE"

Montpelier Parade is just across town, but to Sonny it might as well be a different world. Working with his father in the garden of one of its handsome homes one Saturday, he sees a back door easing open and a beautiful woman coming down the path toward him. This is Vera, the sort of person who seems destined to remain forever out of his reach. Hoping to cast off his loneliness and a restless sense of not belonging--at high school, in his part-time job at the butcher shop, and in the increasingly suffocating company of his own family--Sonny drifts into dreams of a different kind of life. A series of intoxicating encounters with Vera lead him to feel he has fallen in love for the first time, but why does her past seem as unknowable as her future? Unfolding over a bright, rain-soaked Dublin spring, Karl Geary's Montpelier Parade is a rich, devastating debut novel about desire, grief, ambition, art, and the choices we must make alone. Geary is in conversation with JT Petty, an American film director, author, and video game writer.