Garden Lakes - Softcover

Jaime Clarke is a graduate of the University of Arizona and holds an MFA from Bennington College. He is the author of the novels We're So Famous, Vernon Downs and World Gone Water; editor of the anthologies Don't You Forget About Me: Contemporary Writers on the Films of John Hughes, Conversations with Jonathan Lethem, and Talk Show: On the Couch with Contemporary Writers; and co-editor of the anthologies No Near Exit: Writers Select Their Favorite Work from "Post Road" Magazine (with Mary Cotton) and Boston Noir 2: The Classics (with Dennis Lehane and Mary Cotton). He is a founding editor of the literary magazine Post Road, now published at Boston College, and co-owner, with his wife, of Newtonville Books, an independent bookstore in Boston.

Charlie Martens recounts an ill-fated high school program that haunts him into adulthood. Clarke (World Gone Water, 2015, etc.) develops the memorable protagonist of his previous two novels while crafting a story that stands on its own. The novel proceeds through two interwoven narratives. In one, Charlie, a junior at Randolph, an all-boys prep school, is selected to participate in a summer leadership program at Garden Lakes, an unfinished housing development in the Arizona desert. In the second, an adult Charlie is a successful newspaper columnist in Phoenix. Undercurrents of greed and self-interest unite the strands of the novel, from the creation of the fellowship on property donated by a Randolph graduate trying to keep it from being seized by the government to Charlie's career-defining investigative reporting, which sparked legislation but was predicated on deception...As the summer progresses, old and new rifts divide the boys into fighting factions. Abandoned by their advisers and with a heat wave reaching unbearable levels, the structured schedule breaks into fast-paced chaos reminiscent of Lord of the Flies. Charlie, an orphan and transfer student, does not appeal for pity. Still, we see that he is implicated in these events largely in an attempt to fit in. An intriguing cross-section of loneliness and power in the world of boys and men. -- Kirkus Reviews

It takes some nerve to revisit a bulletproof classic, but Jaime Clarke does so, with elegance and a cool contemporary eye, in this cunningly crafted homage to Lord of the Flies. He understands all too well the complex psychology of boyhood, how easily the insecurities and power plays slide into mayhem when adults look the other way. -- Julia Glass, National Book Award-winning author of Three Junes

As tense and tight and pitch-perfect as Clarke's narrative of the harrowing events at Garden Lakes is, and as fine a meditation it is on Golding's novel, what deepens this book to another level of insight and artfulness is the parallel portrait of Charlie Martens as an adult,years after his fateful role that summer, still tyrannized, paralyzed, tangled in lies, wishing for redemption, maybe fated never to get it. Complicated and feral, Garden Lakes is thrilling, literary, and smart as hell. - Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Tinkers

In the flawlessly imagined Garden Lakes, Jaime Clarke pays homage to Lord of the Flies and creates his own vivid, inadvertently isolated community.  As summer tightens its grip, and adult authority recedes, his boys gradually reveal themselves to scary and exhilarating effect.  In the hands of this master of suspense and psychological detail, the result is a compulsively readable novel. - Margot Livesey, author of Mercury

Smart, seductive, and suggestively sinister, Garden Lakes is a disturbingly honest look at how our lies shape our lives and destroy our communities. Read it: Part three in one of the best literary trilogies we have. - Scott Cheshire, author of High as the Horses' Bridles