Furnace Creek teases us with the question of what Charles Dickens’ Pip might have been like had he grown up in the American South of the 1960s and 1970s and faced the explosive issues that galvanized the world in those decades: racial injustice, a devastating war, women’s and gay rights, class struggle.
A guilty encounter with an escaped felon, a summer spent working for an eccentric man with a mysterious past, conflicted erotic feelings for his employer’s niece and nephew: these events set the stage for the journey of sexual and moral discovery that takes Newt Seward from the South to New England, Rome, and Paris as he confronts life’s many expectations and surprises.
A guilty encounter with an escaped felon, a summer spent working for an eccentric man with a mysterious past, conflicted erotic feelings for his employer’s niece and nephew: these events set the stage for the journey of sexual and moral discovery that takes Newt Seward from the South to New England, Rome, and Paris as he confronts life’s many expectations and surprises.
Furnace Creek combines elements of coming-of-age story, novel of erotic discovery, Southern Gothic, and mystery-detection plot. Written with a storyteller’s gift of imagination, it leaps the frame of Dickens’ masterpiece to capture the emotional intensity of characters whose lives haunt readers beyond the page.
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REVIEWS/ENDORSEMENTS
“A funny, moving, and true rendition of everybody’s story: surviving our childhoods, which can be uniquely challenging if you’re Southern, and queer. Boone is a natural novelist, and Furnace Creek is a genuine accomplishment.”
—Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize for The Hours
“[This] ingenious re-telling and re-imagining of Dickens’ Great Expectations . . . plays innocence against experience, youth against age, privilege against poverty, in an America of the 1960s. Its narrator is endearing and knowing and also, like the novelist, a born noticer.”
—Colm Tóibín, Author of The Master and The Magician
“With lyric beauty, welcome frankness, and rare emotional urgency, Boone reimagines Dickens’ Great Expectations in the American South . . . with a queer perspective and countless new and illuminating approaches. Exquisite prose and a storyteller’s elan.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Boone’s prose is lyrical and inventive, merging Dickensian wit and texture with a dash of Southern gothic. The characters are delicately drawn and elegantly complicated.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“A page-turning novel, a spirited American retelling of an English classic . . . . Boone brings both worlds vividly alive with his ebullient prose. A joyously ambitious debut!”
—Marianne Wiggins, Pulitizer and National Book Award nominee for Evidence of Things Unseen and author of Properties of Thirst
“Furnace Creek has everything brilliant novels have . . . It is also wickedly funny, that rare novel full of charming humor and sharp cultural commentary at every turn.”
—Dana Johnson, Flannery O’Connor Award for Break Any Woman Down and author of Elsewhere, California
“A sweeping, Gothic tale of sex, race, and a young man’s education. I was totally entertained and, most of all, seduced.”
—Viet Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer
“A playful reimagining of Dickens, a tautly plotted thriller, a beautifully observed coming of age story: Furnace Creek. . . seizes you from the beginning and refuses to let you go.”
—Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, author of Becoming Dickens and The Turning Point: The Year that Changed Charles Dickens and the World
“The love of literature hinges not just on beautiful writing but on an awareness that the stories of the past have a lot to teach us in the present. By transposing Dickens into our own era, Boone demonstrates just that—and also shows that those stories belong to all of us, regardless of our gender, sexuality, or time in history.”
—Lewis DiSimone, Gay and Lesbian Review International
“The richness of [its] characters makes Furnace Creek work brilliantly. But more: Boone gives them stories that compel the reader to see them as individuals in a specific time and place. Boone’s writing . . . is at times lyrical, memorable, and always in service to the story.”
—Barry Qualls, Southern Review of Literature
“No one can outdo Dickens when it comes to creating characters that hold; but what Dickens couldn’t do that Boone can is give [Great Expectations] a modern twist by exploring the inner life of his teenage protagonist, which is as turbulent as the times . . . A wonderful novel with psychological depth to match a period in American history that was both stormy and exhilarating. Boone is a masterful writer.”
—Molly Engelhardt, Books Cover to Cover
“No single review could possibly encompass the abundance of lives and life underway in [this] novel—nor should anyone wish it to. That’s why we read books like this one: to get happily lost in their capacious, prodigious pages. A satisfyingly substantial libation built upon a potent spirit.”
—Greg Bills,author of Fearful Symmetry and Consider This Home
Full Reviews For Furnace Creek
Suzanne Keen, "Dickens for the Civil Rights-Era South: On Joseph Boone's 'Furnace Creek.'" Los Angeles Review of Books
September 30, 2022
Barry Qualls, "Furnace Creek': Lyrical, Memorable. and Character-Driven." Southern Review of Books
September 14, 2022
Molly Engelhardt, "Furnace Creek: Review," Bookscover2cover
August 16, 2022
Lewis DeSimone. "A Pip for the '60s." The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide
May 2, 2022
"Furnace Creek," Kirkus Review
April 2022
"Furnace Creek, Fiction Review: Editor's Pick." Publishers Weekly
December 5, 2022
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Awards Won By the Book
Winner, LGBTQIA Fiction, National Indie Excellence Awards (2023)
Winner, First Novel, Next Generation Indie Awards (2023)
Honorable Mention in General Fiction, Eric Hoffer Awards (2023)
Honorable Mention, LGBTQ+ Fiction, Foreward Indie Book of the Year Prize (2023)
Shortlist, Grand Prize, Eric Hoffer Awards (2023)
Finalist, “The FIRST Award “ (for debut novel), Eric Hoffer Awards (2023)
Editor’s Pick, Publishers Weekly (December 5, 2022)