Leave Myself Behind: A Novel

The Alex Award-winning novel of a young gay man's search for meaning-from an author whose "voice is more than just honest or original; it's real" (The Plain Dealer).

Meet seventeen-year-old Noah York, the hilariously profane, brutally honest, completely engaging narrator of Bart Yates's astonishing debut novel. With a mouth like a truck driver and eyes that see through the lies of the world, Noah is heading into a life that's only getting more complicated by the day.

His dead father is fading into a snapshot memory, and his psycho-poet mother has relocated them from Chicago to a rural New England hamlet that looks like a bad advertisement for small-town America. The house he now lives in is literally coming apart at the seams as he and his mother renovate the old Victorian-in which they discover disturbing clues to the mysterious existence of a woman who disappeared decades before.

While his mother grows more obsessed with the mysterious woman, Noah fights his own troubling-but irresistible-obsession with the boy next door, the enigmatic J.D. It is J.D. who begins to quietly anchor Noah to his new life. J.D., who is hiding a terrible, haunting pain of his own that will affect Noah in ways he never thought possible . . .

Part Portnoy, part Holden Caulfield, never less than truthful, and always fully human, Noah York is a touching and unforgettable character whose "blunt, funny and dead-on narrative" is sure to entertain and entrance readers (Brian Malloy).