Jess and Tom live on a remote farm in the English countryside with their increasingly difficult and brutal father, Henry. Their mother, Sylvie, walked out years before and Jess is struggling with the role of mother figure to Tom, as well as skivvy and hired hand for her father. Jess just wants to be a normal teenager, to go to dances and kiss boys, to take her exams and dream of a future far away from milking cows and ploughing fields. Daydreaming about her mother’s return, Jess discovers Sylvie’s old diary and begins to uncover the shocking truth about her disappearance.
In 1976, on the day of his wife's funeral, Wylie Greer drops off his five-year-old daughter, Holly, at his father-in-law's dairy farm on the outskirts of Columbia, South Carolina. Wylie tells her he just needs a little time to clear his head, but thirty years pass before Holly sees her father again — "time I spent wondering what I'd done to make him leave," she says, "and what I could do to make him come back."
In a rare moment, professional poker player Jax Gallagher committed a rookie's mistake. He threw an IOU for a valuable baseball that wasn't his to wager into the pot -- and lost. Now the man who won the collectible is demanding his prize . . . or else. The problem is, the ball is in the possession of his estranged father's widow -- a flamboyant Las Vegas showgirl. Jax intends to get it back, by any means available.
Boyd, the author of A Good Man in Africa and Brazzaville Beach, here gives us something entirely new, part suspense, part romance, all grand storytelling. A young woman, waylaid by an old man who claims to be her father, hears his story of corruption and intrigue as the two of them embark on a remarkable journey.
The #1 New York Times bestselling memoir that inspired the film October Sky, Rocket Boys is a uniquely American memoir--a powerful, luminous story of coming of age at the dawn of the 1960s, of a mother's love and a father's fears, of a group of young men who dreamed of launching rockets into outer space . . . and who made those dreams come true.
