Owen Thomas
The Lion Trees
What if survival required you to unlearn who you are?
How far would you fall to save yourself?
Sometimes happiness is a long way down.
The Lion Trees is a sprawling, modern family saga that fully captures one American family in its hysterical, and highly perilous quest to find its authenticity, forgive its transgressions, and keep from shattering into pieces.
This multi-award-winning socio-fiction novel is a unique blend of American satire, psychological insight, humor, courtroom drama, historical sensibility and its reflection on contemporary American culture. The Johns family is unraveling. Hollis, a retired Ohio banker, isolates himself in esoteric hobbies and a dangerous flirtation with a colleague's daughter. His wife of forty years, risks everything for a second chance at who she might have been. Their eldest son thrashes to stay afloat as his teaching career capsizes in a storm of accusations over a missing student and the legacy of Christopher Columbus. While Tilly, the black sheep, trades her literary promise for an improbable career as a starlet and then struggles to define herself amidst a humiliating scandal and the judgment of an uncompromising writer.
By turns comical, suspenseful and poignant, the Johns family is tumbling toward the discovery that sometimes you have to let go of your identity to find out who you are.
